I tried a Claude Code rival thats local, open source, and completely free - how it went
Summary
The author tests a free, local alternative to Claude Code by combining Block's Goose agent framework with the Qwen3-coder LLM served via Ollama. They detail installing Ollama, downloading the ~17GB Qwen3-coder:30b model, exposing Ollama to the network, and configuring Goose to use the local model. On a high-end M4 Max Mac Studio the setup delivered reasonable performance and the benefit of keeping data local, but accuracy and reliability lagged—Goose required multiple retries to produce a correct WordPress plugin. The author finds the approach promising as a low-cost competitor to paid cloud services but says larger projects and further testing are needed before recommending it over paid options like Claude Code.
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