A practical, opinionated setup guide tailored to:
- Hardware: MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128 GB unified memory (~614 GB/s bandwidth on the 40‑core GPU part, a Neural Accelerator in every GPU core — this is genuinely a strong local‑LLM machine).
- Languages: C# (primary) + C/C++ native libraries consumed by the C# framework.
- Editors/agents you already have: VS Code + GitHub Copilot, Claude Code (Max ×20), opencode, Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, MLX.
- Extra requirements: some models must see images (UI failure screenshots); some must reach the internet (fetch packages, read docs).
Bottom line up front: No local model matches Claude (via your Claude Code Max plan) for the hardest reasoning/agentic work. The win from local models is privacy, zero marginal cost, offline capability, and instant inline completion. Use local models as your default daily drivers and keep **Claude Code as the escalation ti