Local Coding Agent Setup Guide for macOS with Gemma 4
Original: How to setup a local coding agent on macOS
Why This Matters
Shows practical local AI deployment for developers seeking independence from cloud services
Tutorial demonstrates setting up a local coding agent on macOS using Gemma 4 26B-A4B model with llama.cpp, achieving 72.2 tokens/second through MTP speculative decoding on M1 Max with 64GB memory.
Kyle Howells published a comprehensive guide for running a local coding agent on macOS after internet outages left him without cloud-based coding assistance. The setup uses llama.cpp with Metal acceleration, Gemma 4 26B-A4B model in GGUF format (16GB), and MTP speculative decoding for improved performance. Testing on Apple M1 Max with 64GB unified memory showed baseline performance of 58.2 tokens/second, improving to 72.2 tokens/second (24% speedup) with Q8 MTP draft model. Optimal configuration used --spec-draft-n-max value of 3 draft tokens. The system includes multimodal support for screenshot processing and works through OpenAI-compatible API for integration with other tools. Pi terminal coding agent provides the interface.