Running local LLMs offline on a ten-hour flight

https://deploy.live/blog/running-local-llms-offline-on-a-ten-hour-flight/

by darccio • 3 months ago

129 104 3 months ago

deploy.live

ddarolfi• 3 months ago

Qwen 4.6 36B? Do they mean Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

mikeatlas• 3 months ago

yes

Johnny_Bonk• 3 months ago

So I have a RTX 3080 10GB VRAM which I've been using with Qwen2.5 Coder and Gemma 4 E2B. Im wondering what models you have tried with which quants.

trvz• 3 months ago

Yes. The author is really sloppy if that wasn’t clear from the article.

deanc2• 3 months ago

This has been exactly my experience too. I've tried multiple harnesses (pi, claude code, codex) with multiple variants of qwen3.6 and gemma4 driven by both o mlx and ollama - and every single time I try to do anything meaningful I end up in a loop. On a 64GB Macbook Pro M3 Max.

I really don't know what the hell people are doing locally, and suspect a lot of the hype around running these models locally is bullshit. Sure, you can make it do something but certainly nothing useful or substantial.

ryandrake3• 3 months ago

Same here. Every time a new local model comes out, I give it a spin with a pretty vanilla coding task ("refactor this method to take two parameters instead of one", or "fix this class of compiler warning across the ~20 file codebase") and more often than not, they get in endless loops, or fail in very unusual ways. They don't yet even approach the usefulness of SOTA models. It's obviously not a fair comparison, though. My 20GB GPU is never going to beat whatever enormous backend Google or Anthropic have.

2ndorderthought5• 3 months ago

You can do this with really small models but you have to do a more legwork. I wouldn't expect most trivially small models to handle anything more than 1 file reliably. The new qwen 3.6 is different though, I have heard cases where it is behaving close to sonnet.

That said I don't see why people are so scared to touch code even if it saves them 500 euro a month. Using my IDEs find across my repo and auto replacing 2 patterns is trivial to do and way faster to do by hand. I mostly use small models, it prevents a lot of the issues I've seen with large models and vibe/agentic coding medium to long term. I also write a lot of code.

proxysna3• 3 months ago

You need to set sampling parameters for the llm. Had the same issue with Qwen3.5 when i first started. You can grab them off the model card page usually.

From Qwen3.6 page:

Thinking mode for general tasks: temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=0.0, repetition_penalty=1.0

Thinking mode for precise coding tasks (e.g. WebDev): temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=0.0, repetition_penalty=1.0

Instruct (or non-thinking) mode: temperature=0.7, top_p=0.80, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=1.5, repetition_penalty=1.0

deanc2• 3 months ago

Yes, have tried all of these (as per the docs). Have you actually tried these? Because I have tried all 3 configurations with agentic coding that you mentioned and have the same result - loops.

Der_Einzige4• 3 months ago

min_p author here. min_p is strictly better than top_p and top_k. The big labs don't know shit about sampling, and give absolutely nuts recommendations like this.

set min_p to like 0.3 and ignore top_p and top_k and you'll be fine.

There's better samplers now like top N sigma, top-h, P-less decoding, etc, but they're often not available in your LLM inference engine (i.e. vLLM)

2ndorderthought5• 3 months ago

In the article the author describes what they made. It's definitely not bullshit, but it's also not as reliable or as handsfree as the 1t models.

For people who aren't completely vibe or agent coding these models are better than say copilot or the free models appearing after a Google search. Probably better than chatgpts flagships in some ways.

I mostly use 4b to 9b models for basic inquiries and code examples from libraries I haven't used before. Many of them can solve pretty hard math problems, and these are several steps away from say qwen3.6.

I would not discount running models locally. It's the best case scenario of a future with LLMs from a human rights and ecological perspective.

mft_2• 3 months ago

I’m frequently surprised how little I can find online about exactly this - different harnesses for local models and how to set them up. The documentation for opencode with local models is (IMO) pretty bad - and even Claude Opus (!) struggled to get it running. And so far I’ve not found a decent alternative to Claude Desktop.

(I’ve recently discovered that you can pipe local models into Claude’s Code and Desktop, so this is on my list to try).

2ndorderthought5• 3 months ago

Qwen3.6 is brand new. But also, search engines are so plastered with AI slop that is written by tools and companies that have no interest in you using local models. Ollama makes it 1 command to run local small models, but with the newest ones there can be kinks to work out first.

/R/localllama is okay for some information but beyond that there is so much noise and very little signal. I think it's intentional.

NitpickLawyer2• 3 months ago

a lot of the hype around running these models locally is bullshit. Sure, you can make it do something but certainly nothing useful or substantial.

There is certainly a lot of hype around local models. Some of it is overhype, some of it is just "people finding out" and discovering what cool stuff you can do. I suspect the post is a reply to the other one a few days ago where someone from hf posted a pic with them in the plane, using a local model, and saying it's really really close to opus. That was BS.

That being said, I've been working with local LMs since before chatgpt launched. The progress we've made from the likes of gpt-j (6B) and gpt-neoX (22B) (some of the first models you could run on regular consumer hardware) is absolutely amazing. It has gone way above my expectations. We're past "we have chatgpt at home" (as it was when launched), and now it is actually usable in a lot of tasks. Nowhere near SotA, but "good enough".

I will push back a bit on the "substantial" part, and I will push a lot on "nothing useful". You can, absolutely get useful stuff out of these models. Not in a claude-code leave it to cook for 6 hours and get a working product, but with a bit of hand holding and scope reduction you can get useful stuff. When devstral came out (24B) I ran it for about a week as a "daily driver" just to see where it's at. It was ok-ish. Lots of hand holding, figured out I can't use it for planning much (looked fine at a glance, but either didn't make sense, or used outdated stuff). But with a better plan, it could handle implementation fine. I coded 2 small services that have been running in prod for ~6mo without any issues. That is useful, imo. And the current models are waaay better than devstral1.

As to substantial, eh... Your substantial can be someone else's taj mahal, and their substantial could be your toy project. It all depends. I draw the line at useful. If you can string together a couple of useful tasks, it starts to become substantial.

tarolangner• 3 months ago

Can you share more on how your setup has changed over time for running these? Do you prompt them for code samples like some people do with ChatGPT or did you integrate them into your IDE or some kind of custom harness?

xienze• 3 months ago

It's probably a combination of things:

* New models running in llama.cpp (what's under the hood of ollama et al) frequently require bug fixes.

* The GGUF models that run in llama.cpp frequently require bug fixes (Unsloth is notorious for this -- they release GGUF models about 10 minutes after official .safetensors releases).

* You're probably running a <Q8 quantization of the model, and a good chance <BF16 quantization for KV cache. This makes for compounding issues as context grows and tool calls multiply.

Local models really are great but I think a major problem are the people in groups like r/localllama who run models at absurd quantization levels in order to cram them on their underpowered hardware and convince themselves that they're running SOTA at home.

The best way to run these models is, frankly, a lot of VRAM and vLLM (which is what the people developing these models are almost certainly targeting).

bachmeier• 3 months ago

Sure, you can make it do something but certainly nothing useful or substantial.

It works great for me. But I like to review the code and understand what it's doing, which doesn't appear to be how people do "useful or substantial" programming these days.

2ndorderthought5• 3 months ago

Everytime I am on here I am baffled by how many people just spin the wheel these days. The most important part of the sdlc for me is having humans involved in the code base. Can't plan improvements, features, refactors, etc if you don't know what the code looks like. But here we are I guess.

bityard• 3 months ago

Hosted models are big, and there is a lot going on behind the scenes that we users have no visibility into. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc do much more than just feed raw prompt tokens straight into a big 1-2TB static model and pipe the output tokens back to the web browser. The result of this is that they can do more, and end-users can get away with a lot more in terms of vague prompts and missing background.

The biggest lesson I've learned working with local models so far is: with the smaller models, you have to understand their limitations, be willing to run experiments, and fine-tune the heck out of everything. There are endless choices to be made: which model to use, which quant, thinking or not, sampling parameters, llama.cpp vs vLLM, etc. They much more fiddly for serious work than just downloading Claude Code and having it one-shot your application. But some of us enjoy fiddling so it all works out in the end.

2ndorderthought5• 3 months ago

I've done zero fine tuning in the local models I use. I also didn't do a lot of experiments except asking the 4 or 5 I downloaded what version of x package was the newest. For my work flows small models are king.

sleepyeldrazi3• 3 months ago

I have been testing and using Qwen3.6 27B (running from my 3090) since it dropped and I genuinely think this is the first consumer hardware-grade model that can actually replace frontiers for a lot of workloads.

I ran 8 tests on a variety of open-weights models, and opus 4.7 (1mil ctx version) and the little dense model was right behind it: https://github.com/sleepyeldrazi/llm_programming_tests/tree/... Of note is that opus was the only model to push back against the spec on the hardest challenge, saying 'thats not possible', when there are links in the spec to examples of it being done.

There may be problems with the mlx versions, as i haven't had any looping in all the testing i've done, which is all my agentic and coding work the last couple of days (since it dropped). I have had tool_call misses 4 or 5 times so far, which isn't ideal but no looping. First I used it in pi-mono and later when i realized it's a serious model switched to opencode.

My setup is llama.cpp running on a 3090 in WSL, unsloth IQ4_NL with those flags: --ctx-size 128000 \ --jinja \ --temp 0.6 \ --top-p 0.95 \ --top-k 20 \ --min-p 0.0 \ --repeat-penalty 1.0 \ --presence-penalty 0.0 \ --threads 12 \ --gpu-layers 99 \ --no-warmup \ --no-mmap \ -fa on

fy20• 3 months ago

Running it on a Macbook Pro M5 48GB:

        -hf unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:UD-Q6_K_XL \ 
        -c 128000 \
        --parallel 1 \
        --flash-attn on \
        --no-context-shift \
        --cache-type-k q8_0 \
        --cache-type-v q8_0 \
        --temp 0.6 \
        --top-p 0.95 \
        --top-k 20 \
        --min-p 0.0 \
        --presence_penalty 0.0 \
        --reasoning on \
        --jinja \
        --chat-template-kwargs "{\"preserve_thinking\": true}" \
        --spec-type ngram-simple \
        --draft-max 64 \
        --timeout 1800

Maybe someone knows any tips to optimise prompt processing as that's the slowest part? It takes a few minutes before OpenCode with ~20k initial context first responds, but subsequent responses are pretty fast due to caching.

cadamsdotcom• 3 months ago

I have been testing

With local models which are often benchmaxxed, testing unfortunately isn’t as predictive as you’d like.

fmajid• 3 months ago

Combine that with full ZIMs of Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, plus documentation of your languages of choice, and you should be golden. I have 4TB SSDs in almost all my laptops (except Macs due to Tim Apple's price-gouging, but I am transitioning away from macOS), and I sync my entire eBook library as well so I am fully covered on the reference manual front.

usagisushi• 3 months ago

If the "loop" you mean is the infinite reasoning cycle ("Wait, actually... On second thought..."), you might want to try setting a reasoning budget. For llama.cpp, use `--reasoning-budget 1024 --reasoning-budget-message "Proceed to final answer."` to force the model to reach a conclusion.

I admit I sometimes get caught up in the tooling for its own sake, but I find local models useful for specific tasks like migrating configuration schemas, writing homelab scripts, or exploring financial data.

It might sound a bit paranoid, but privacy is another major driver for me. Keeping credentials and private information off cloud services is worth the extra friction.

slowmovintarget• 3 months ago

Task-driven repo, clear your context (restart the harness), check the results.

Don't try for a rambling session where you let the thing grind for hours on a huge system. It will predictably choke or end in those loops. But do a few small chunks of work, exit the harness, then pick up the next few small chunks... It doesn't feel as magical, but it seems to be more effective, even when your model is Claude.

jonaustin2• 3 months ago

Try https://github.com/jundot/omlx

I've been using qwen3.5 (122b) with claude code for months, and it's definitely dumber than sonnet/opus, but it works through things reasonably well (i.e. writes half-decent code and tool calls usually work), and I pretty much never run into loops now.

and make sure you're following Unsloth's recommendations for temperature/etc.

vladgur• 3 months ago

That window seat with the 14” laptop seems extremely claustrophobic.

That’s the real limitation on an economy flight - space rather than power or the internet… at least it would be for me.

The only times I was able to get my laptop out and do some productive work was when I either was sitting in premium economy isle seat with room to spare or when there was an empty seat next to me

rootusrootus2• 3 months ago

I'd probably choose the window seat myself, because while it is cramped, it is predictably so. When I sit in an aisle seat, it's not as cramped but I regularly get shoulder checked by passing people or beverage carts.

What really makes me nervous if I'm in an economy seat is the seat in front of me. Depending on how the seat is designed, if the person suddenly reclines (or hell, just flexes the seat a bunch while moving around), it can come pretty close to pinching the laptop screen. That would be bad news.

ryandrake3• 3 months ago

That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the image. That's a very expensive computer that you risk destroying when the 300lb guy in front of you decides to lean back.

The ergonomics of using a laptop on an economy-class tray table are not worth it. You're sitting there like a T-rex trying to make your arms as small as possible to tap on the keys. And the vertical viewing angle to your screen sometimes prevents you from even seeing anything. I wouldn't even bring my laptop out during a flight.

bs7280• 3 months ago

I have a 16" M1 Max that I only got because it was $1500 cheaper than MSRP, and it sucks on planes. I have really long arms and I can barely get it out of my bag without elbowing my neighbor.

A few years ago I saw some very interesting custom ergonomic setups optimized for traveling + flying.

One person with a thinkpad is able to get the monitor to be 180 degrees flat w/ the keyboard, and can hang it off the seat. He also brings a split ergo keyboard with a lap mount.

Another person did something similar with a M1 laptop, but needs an Ipad to act as the external monitor (laptop stays in bag) with a built and designed from scratch split ergo keyboard.

zdw• 3 months ago

That's a 16" (from the size of the speaker grille on each side of the keyboard), so even more claustrophobic.

stavros3• 3 months ago

I got some Xreal glasses and it's made flights so much more enjoyable. I can watch movies or work on something lying back, and the "screen" looks massive.

JSR_FDED2• 3 months ago

I’ve been so tempted but some of the reviews say it’s not good for reading code. What’s been your experience? What is the effective resolution of the screen you get? Is it sharp enough for coding?

bobro• 3 months ago

Can’t you guys just read a book and take a nap?

3form• 3 months ago

I suppose the ones that do, wouldn't consider such a turn of events postworthy.

cpursley• 3 months ago

I'm jealous of people who can actually get comfortable enough to sleep on flights.

koolba• 3 months ago

With enough drinks and a long enough flight, it’s unavoidable.

stavros3• 3 months ago

Why would I do that when making things is so much fun?

mdni007• 3 months ago

But then how can I show random people how productive I am?

ducttape122• 3 months ago

Yeah, for real. Imagine being so addicted to the AI slot machine that you can't be without it for 10 hours.

fhn• 3 months ago

Imagine criticizing people for what they do with their time.

dude250711• 3 months ago

If you nap, then you might end up living in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than you are.

j1000• 3 months ago

To be honest, I think possibility to work and travel is con rather than perk of current times.

ryandrake3• 3 months ago

It hit different at different points in my life. When I was in my 20s I thought "Wow! I get to go on an international trip to a place I've never been, and work is paying for everything?!? I'll go whenever you need me to go!" Now that I'm almost 50, it's "Fuck. Another 14 hour international flight, to somewhere I'll likely only have time to see the inside of two buildings. What's the local language again? Do I drive on the left or right? Wait, how long do I need to stay? Please no."

HoldOnAMinute• 3 months ago

They keep removing the ability for you to have any downtime.

jamesu• 3 months ago

I'm not a huge fan of working while travelling, it's way too distracting while trying to do intricate development work.

bilekas2• 3 months ago

Trying LLM in the air with a 6.200 EUR laptop... Sorry if it's not exactly relatable..

zahlman• 3 months ago

You got downvoted, but my reaction was much the same honestly.

bilekas2• 3 months ago

I don't mind being downvoted, if we all had the same opinion it would be quite boring around here. I guess I'm just jaded from AI news.

dgacmu• 3 months ago

one one hand, I'm typing this on a 5 year old M1 MBP that I still can't bring myself to replace because it just continues to do the things I need;

on the other hand, $6200 every few years is pretty tiny compared to a typical US developer salary, so is this really that crazy if it's your primary work machine?

builderminkyu• 3 months ago

tried doing exactly this with ollama on a cross-country flight last month. my macbook basically turned into a jet engine and the battery died in under an hour.

curious if you had to heavily throttle the cpu or stick to super small quants (like 4 bit phi3) to actually make it through 10 hours without a power outlet?

julianlam• 3 months ago

Using an LLM to code without AC power is ... certainly a choice.

On my framework 13 a couple exploratory prompts and a code writing step drained my battery to 85% in about 5 minutes.

tamimio• 3 months ago

Can’t wait for more people to do the same and eventually getting laptops banned on board due fear of catching fire..

scastiel• 3 months ago

Interesting, I did and document the same kind of experiment a few months ago [1], it looks like so much changed since then!

[1] https://betweentheprompts.com/40000-feet/

mumbisChungo• 3 months ago

Qwen 4.6 36B

Did the author mean Qwen3.6-27B? Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

walrus01• 3 months ago

As much as it's a fun gimmick to run a relatively good sized LLM like qwen 3.6 35B locally, I would much rather have the ability to run it remotely on a piece of hardware I control via VPN session. Much better on battery life and heat. If I'm on an airplane I care about having as much battery life as possible.

Let's say you have a basic setup like llama.cpp and llama-server on a remote server (even if it's just sitting under your home office desk) running a 35GB Q8 quantized model of qwen 3.6 35B, it's not difficult to make llama-server available to your laptop over just about any form of internet connection and VPN.

Having the ability to run that same model locally if you really need to because no internet connection whatsoever is available, but the times that you simultaneously have no internet and a serious need for something the model can output are fairly rare these days.

garethsprice2• 3 months ago

This is what I am doing - it is rare that I'm in a situation with no Internet while traveling, but very often there is an intermittent connection. Using local models or even hosted foundation models is frustrating exercise in cancelled jobs and timeouts, but Tailscale + mosh + tmux is a really nice way to connect to a workstation and resume from where the session left off - or leave it running doing its thing and come back to it later.

Same with running my local dev environment's docker containers, now they run on that workstation and my battery life is far higher, treating my portable device as a dumb terminal.

datadrivenangel• 3 months ago

Agreed. I got a beefy M5 MBP for local llms and for sustained inference it gets hot enough that I worry it may end up shortening its life.

seattle_spring• 3 months ago

With more and more flights offering Starlink, I don't see why this would really ever be necessary.

Also, agreed with the other commenters: just read a damn book and take a nap.

AntiUSAbah• 3 months ago

I hope starlink will not be the default.

Not only shouldn't we support someone like Elon Musk but also don't you find it hypcritic to respond with 'just read a damn book' and suggesting starlink?

cube00• 3 months ago

MacBook cable: 94W delivered

Return flight will test this with the correct cable. I expect at least 16% improvement against the 70W cap

Some plane sockets cut out completely if you attempt to draw more then the limit rather then continuing to provide power at the limit.

davidcox143• 3 months ago

The MBP also throttles surprisingly easily. I have a 16 MBP and ended up buying a cooling stand that uses a 20w peltier cooler (solid state heat pump). It’s fixed the throttling completely, although I’m somewhat nervous about forgetting to turn the cooler off and creating condensation inside the case…

ntcho• 3 months ago

Have you tried MacsFanControl? MBP fans rarely turn on by themselves, but controlling yourself makes throttling not a problem

djsavvy• 3 months ago

I’ve long suspected as such. Is there a way to power limit what my macbook pulls from the outlet?

asimovDev• 3 months ago

My 14in M3 Max turns the fans way up when running local agentic coding for me to be comfortable with using it in a public place.

gck1• 3 months ago

I don't use my M3 Max in public, but running local models on it makes me uncomfortable because of fans too.

I also have a Dell laptop that spin up fans if I open a text editor, and it feels normal, but on Mac, I feel like fans spinning up is me somehow abusing it and shortening its lifespan.

aitchnyu• 3 months ago

Reminds me of a previous generation (plastic shell) MBP drawing both AC and battery for sustained peak performance, fans spinning.

calcexp• 3 months ago

I don't know if this has been asked here, but is it really possible to connect to a free search service like Google? The point is to use information that's relevant to, say, 2026.

prettyblocks2• 3 months ago

There are paid solutions for this, I've seen Exa recommended.

prettyblocks2• 3 months ago

I've been relatively impressed with local llms, but by far the hardest thing for me is how hot they make my laptop run.

devsecopsify• 3 months ago

Author here

Great engagement!

Apologies for the sloppinnes in model names. I've been writing it at 1am in Vegas, which was 9am in London (a time my body was operating at) - I was dozing off while finishing it - but excitement about my offline experience kept be _somewhat_ going. I've fixed model naming inconsistencies.

I've updated post with some more info and responses to your comments, I hope you find it useful.

Running local LLMs offline on a ten-hour flight

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