r/gamedev by u/lpshred 1mo ago Post-mortem: I tried and failed vibe coding a metroidvania so you (hopefully) won't have to TLDR; Last Friday, I gave up on my vibe-coded game because I came to the conclusion that it was never going to work. I spent about 40 hours over a couple of months chasing a dream fueled by AI marketing hype. Vibe-coding full projects is largely a myth and today’s models and agents aren’t able to build anything more than prototypes. You can’t use AI to make up for not knowing GDScript or Godot. The time you spend fumbling around with AI would be better spent learning the technical skills.
If you’re a seasoned game developer, you already know this. I’m sharing this story for anyone out there who, like me, felt like learning game dev is an impossibly huge task and that AI might be the answer to that problem. I hope this can serve as a reality check to help stem the tide of “AI Slop” inundating society. Behind every “AI Slop” is someone that is naive and hopeful they could build something useful. Experts in every field have been screaming at the top of their lungs that vibe-coding is bunk for a while now, but I still thought that \*maybe\* they were wrong and I was smart enough to use AI to build something good. Now I’m just another disappointed Joe Schmoe. If the hoard of vibe-coder
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/paulgear 3mo ago Is Qwen3.5 a coding game changer for anyone else? I've been playing with local LLMs for nearly 2 years on a rig with 3 older GPUs and 44 GB total VRAM, starting with Ollama, but recently using llama.cpp. I've used a bunch of different coding assistant tools, including [Continue.dev](http://Continue.dev), [Cline](https://github.com/cline/cline/), [Roo Code](https://github.com/RooCodeInc/Roo-Code/), Amazon Q (rubbish UX, but the cheapest way to get access to Sonnet 4.x models), Claude Code (tried it for 1 month - great models, but too expensive), and eventually settling on [OpenCode](https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/).
I've tried most of the open weight and quite a few commercial models, including Qwen 2.5/3 Coder/Coder-Next, MiniMax M2.5, Nemotron 3 Nano, all of the Claude models, and various others that escape my memory now.
I want to be able to run a hands-off agentic workflow a-la Geoffrey Huntley's "Ralph", where I just set it going in a loop and it keeps working until it's done. Until this week I considered all of the local models a bust in terms of coding productivity (and Claude, because of cost). Most of the time they had trouble following instructions for more than 1 task, and even breaking them up into a dumb lo
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/dtdisapointingresult 1mo ago I'm done with using local LLMs for coding I think gave it a fair shot over the past few weeks, forcing myself to use local models for non-work tech asks. I use Claude Code at my job so that's what I'm comparing to.
I used Qwen 27B and Gemma 4 31B, these are considered the best local models under the multi-hundred LLMs. I also tried multiple agentic apps. My verdict is that the loss of productivity is not worth it the advantages.
I'll give a brief overview of my main issues.
**Shitty decision-making and tool-calls**
This is a big one. Claude seems to read my mind in most cases, but Qwen 27B makes me give it the Carlo Ancelotti eyebrow more often than not. The LLM just isn't proceeding how I would proceed.
I was mainly using local LLMs for OS/Docker tasks. Is this considered much harder than coding or something?
To give an example, tasks like *"Here's a Github repo, I want you to Dockerize it."* I'd expect any dummy to follow the README's instructions and execute them. (EDIT: full prompt here: https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sxqa2c/im_done_with_using_local_llms_for_coding/oiowcxe/ )
Issues like having a 'docker build' that takes longer than the default timeout, which sends them on unrelated follow-ups (as if
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/Glittering_Focus1538 26d ago I built a coding agent that gets 87% on benchmarks with a 4B parameter model, here's how I was frustrated that every coding agent (OpenCode, Cursor, Claude Code) assumes you're running GPT-5.4 or Claude Opus. If you try them with a local model like Gemma or Qwen they fall apart. I find that often tool calls fail, context overflows, multi-step tasks collapse.
So I built SmallCode. It's designed from the ground up for small local models.
**The result:** 87/100 benchmark tasks pass with a Gemma 4 model that only activates 4B parameters per token. OpenCode scores \~75% with 14B models. The harness does the heavy lifting, not the model size.
**How it works (the tricks that make small models reliable):**
* **Compound tools:** Instead of making the model chain 4 tool calls (find file → read file → edit file → verify), SmallCode gives it one tool that does all 4. Small models lose coherence after 3+ sequential calls. This cuts failures in half.
* **Improvement loop:** Every time the model writes code, SmallCode instantly compiles/lints it. If it fails, it feeds the errors back automatically. The model doesn't need to be smart enough to get it right first try — it just needs to fix errors when shown them.
* **Decompose on failure:** If the model fails the same thing twice,
Open on Reddit r/webdev by u/Rockytriton 2mo ago Software developers don't need to out-last vibe coders, we just need to out-last the ability of AI companies to charge absurdly low for their products These AI models cost so much to run and the companies are really hiding the real cost from consumers while they compete with their competitors to be top dog. I feel like once it's down to just a couple companies left we will see the real cost of these coding utilities. There's no way they are going to be able to keep subsidizing the cost of all of the data centers and energy usage. How long it will last is the real question.
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/RIPT1D3_Z 11mo ago What's your AI coding workflow? A few months ago I tried Cursor for the first time, and “vibe coding” quickly became my hobby.
It’s fun, but I’ve hit plenty of speed bumps:
• Context limits: big projects overflow the window and the AI loses track.
• Shallow planning: the model loves quick fixes but struggles with multi-step goals.
• Edit tools: sometimes they nuke half a script or duplicate code instead of cleanly patching it.
• Unknown languages: if I don’t speak the syntax, I spend more time fixing than coding.
I’ve been experimenting with prompts that force the AI to plan and research before it writes, plus smaller, reviewable diffs. Results are better, but still far from perfect.
So here’s my question to the crowd:
**What’s your AI-coding workflow?**
What tricks (prompt styles, chain-of-thought guides, external tools, whatever) actually make the process smooth and steady for you?
Looking forward to stealing… uh, learning from your magic!
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/Zestyclose-Tour-3856 4mo ago Should I invest in a beefy machine for local AI coding agents in 2026? Hey everyone,
So I've been freelancing as a dev for a good while now, and over the past year I've gotten *really* into using AI agents for coding. My main workflow involves Claude Code, Cursor for one of my projects, and I occasionally mess around with Antigravity + Gemini Flash for design stuff.
Here's my problem though: the credit burn is real. Especially with Claude Code - I'm hitting those session limits way faster than I'd like. And before anyone roasts me, no I'm not full-on vibe coding. I mainly use it to speed up certain dev tasks and then review everything after to make sure it's solid. But even with that relatively conservative usage, I'm constantly bumping into the "you've reached your limit" message.
I've got the Pro plan right now. Yeah yeah, I should probably just upgrade to Max, but I'm hesitating on pulling that trigger.
Which brings me to my actual question: I'm due for a hardware upgrade anyway (currently on a base M1 Mac from 2020), and I'm wondering if it makes sense to go big - like *really* big - to run coding agents locally and basically never worry about limits again. I've been eyeing something like the upcoming M5 Max Mac Studio with maxed out RAM.
But
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/Sad_Bandicoot_6925 2mo ago OpenClaw has 250K GitHub stars. The only reliable use case I've found is daily news digests. So I run cloud infra where people spin up Linux VMs. We made a video a while back showing how to deploy OpenClaw on an isolated VM in like 7 minutes, and it kind of took off. We've had roughly a thousand OpenClaw deploys since then.
I've also talked to a bunch of people in my network who went all in on OpenClaw - not weekend tinkerers, people who spent weeks trying to make it actually useful. Engineers, founders, people who really wanted this to work.
Here’s what I found: there are zero legitimate use cases.
Not saying that OpenClaw is fake - it's a real piece of software. It installs. It runs. It connects to your messaging apps. It can talk to Claude and GPT. It can execute shell commands. The technology exists.
But when I looked at what people are actually doing with it - across our thousand deploys, across conversations with my network, across the flood of LinkedIn and Twitter posts - I couldn’t find a single use case that holds up under scrutiny.
The core issue is: Memory, and everything else flows from it.
OpenClaw runs as a persistent agent. It’s supposed to be your always-on assistant. But its memory is unreliable, and the worst part - you don’t know when it will break
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/Ueberlord 2mo ago OpenCode concerns (not truely local) I know we all love using opencode, I just recently found out about it and my experience is generally positive so far.
Working on customizing my prompts and tools I eventually had to modify the inner tool code to make it suit my need. This has lead me to find out that by default, when you run `opencode serve` and use the web UI
**--> opencode will proxy all requests internally to** [**https://app.opencode.ai**](https://app.opencode.ai)**!**
([relevant code part](https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/4d7cbdcbef92bb69613fe98ba64e832b5adddd79/packages/opencode/src/server/server.ts#L560))
There is currently no option to change this behavior, no startup flag, nothing. You do not have the option to serve the web app locally, using \`opencode web\` just automatically opens the browser with the proxied web app, not a true locally served UI.
There are a lot of open PRs and issues regarding this problem in their github (incomplete list):
* [https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/12446](https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/12446)
* [https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/12829](https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/12829)
* [https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/p
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/vishwa1238 10mo ago Open-source model that is as intelligent as Claude Sonnet 4 I spend about 300-400 USD per month on Claude Code with the max 5x tier. I’m unsure when they’ll increase pricing, limit usage, or make models less intelligent. I’m looking for a cheaper or open-source alternative that’s just as good for programming as Claude Sonnet 4. Any suggestions are appreciated.
Edit: I don’t pay $300-400 per month. I have Claude Max subscription (100$) that comes with a Claude code. I used a tool called ccusage to check my usage, and it showed that I use approximately $400 worth of API every month on my Claude Max subscription. It works fine now, but I’m quite certain that, just like what happened with cursor, there will likely be a price increase or a higher rate limiting soon.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ll try out Kimi2, R1, qwen 3, glm4.5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro and update how it goes in another post. :)
Open on Reddit r/LocalLLaMA by u/VirtualWishX 5mo ago RTX 5090 - What is the most up to date Model that can actually work? 🤔 more details inside Hi All,
I looked around on other posts before I asked but it didn't help me much because, first of all I'm a newbie for LLM models, I just downloaded LM Studio (looks easy for my level).
But I wonder if you can recommend me a Model that won't be slow-motion and OOM on my specs, I never tried offline Models before, my only minor experience with models that can work on my system is via ComfyUI for image and videos (Qwen 2511, Wan 2.2 etc..)
*My Specs:*
\- Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
\- Nvidia RTX 5090 32GB VRAM
\- 96 RAM 6400 Mhz
\- Nvme SSD
\- Windows 11 Pro
\---
🟢 What I'm looking for? 🤔
I would like to try an uncensored model, but I don't think it's a must I'm just curious about it since it's an option I never tried before, but that's not my highest priority.
🔸 I'm looking for something to help me out with design questions, GUI, layouts, visual workflows and if there is such beast: allows me to Drag n Drop image and ask question about it similar to Gpt 5.1 I use CoPilot)
🔸 Also, generating promps will be helpful based on image I will drag n drop (I create datasets for training LoRA)
Any my most interest thing that I never tried before!
Some sort of Vibe-Code, fo
Open on Reddit r/webdev by u/CTT1_ 10mo ago Which is the best eCommerce/Site builder (If there all bad)??? Hey everyone,
I'm building a website for my 3D printing business, and I’m looking for the best website builder/platform that can handle everything I need without being too expensive or overly complicated to manage. Any recommendations or real-world experiences with a platform that fits these needs? Is there *any* platform that can actually do all this well? Or am I better off hiring a dev to custom build it?
I hear Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and many others are terrible and Webflow is too hard for newbies like me and Webflow and Framer doesn't have good eCommerce I guess? Loveable and Replit I'm not too sure of and how easy it would be to edit and build the site after using the AI builders
Any help would be great! I spent weeks trying to find the best one and that WONT BREAK THE BANK like Shopify would if you count all the plugins + shopify I would have to pay for adding up to over $100+ a month or $1200+ a year which is crazy for a startup
**Online Store / Shop**
* Product listings with images, variants (size, color), and pricing and customer reviews
* Shopping cart and secure checkout
* Inventory management
* Mobile-friendly design
**User Account Creation / Login**
* Orde
Open on Reddit r/selfhosted by u/tombo12354 5mo ago Running rsync to backup to an external drive, when the drive is not mounted Wanted to share my experience, so others could learn from my mistakes and provide feedback on other possible solutions. tl;dr make sure external drives are actually mounted before letting automated scripts run that check differences and copy files accordingly.
After getting a media sever up and running, I decided to implement a backup strategy, specifically a 3-2-1 system. My setup was as follows:
Main Server: 500 GB SSD with 16 TB HDD DAS in RAID 5
On-site Backip: 8 TB HDD external drive
Off-site Backup: 8 TB HDD (offline)
The on-site and off-site HDD are rotated every month. Technically, the DAS is larger than the backup, but at the moment the 8 TB backup is only around 50% full. Ultimately, may need to upgrade some disks in the future, but for now this works with some headroom for growth. The final step was dropping a script in the /etc/cron.daily folder to run rsync nightly to move the internal SSD data (config) and DAS HDD (media) to the backup HDD, which was mounted at /media/server/backup.
This setup worked well for a while until a power outage occurred. Initially, everything was fine as the server and HDDs were all on a UPS. However, the outage ended up lasting several
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