Gemma

Anthropic pulled Fable and Mythos from the market following US intervention, a frustrating move considering Fable was performing for me like Opus was six months ago, before the steady performance degradation across versions 4.6+. It really makes me wonder where LLM proliferation needs to go to ensure we aren’t tied to these frontier labs.

A future path seems realistic with the continuous improvements in capabilities of consumer hardware like the new Apple M-series paired with MLX, the inevitable arrival of Apple foundation models as announced during the WWDC2026, and the rapid growth of open-source coding harnesses, local agent platforms like OpenClaw and Hermes, and tools like Ollama and LM Studio. It is only a matter of time before we gain real independence.

Performance and thermals were within my low expectations and I can see the Macbook Air M5 getting quite hot and throttling. I’ve been tackling simple tasks locally on my MacBook Air M5 (10C, 32GB) using LM Studio with Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT and Zed editor, and the experience was remarkably similar to using an Anthropic model from a year ago. Honestly, seeing a mere 12-month gap between self-hosted LLMs on consumer hardware and the frontier labs gives me plenty of hope that within the next 12-24 months, I’ll be running something comparable to Opus 4.8 or Fable 5 right on my desk. It’s surprisingly relieving to not think about token consumption and usage limits; I feel more empowered this way.