Cline and LM Studio: the local coding stack with Qwen3 Coder 30B

Summary

You can now run Cline completely offline. No API costs, no data leaving your machine, no internet dependency. Just you, your laptop, and an AI coding agent that can analyze repositories, write code, and execute terminal commands -- all while you're on a boat in the middle of the ocean.The stack is simple: LM Studio provides the runtime, Qwen3 Coder 30B provides the intelligence, and Cline orchestrates the work. Together, they create a local coding environment that's both powerful and private. An inflection momentLocal models have crossed a threshold. Qwen3 Coder 30B, especially in its optimized MLX format on Apple Silicon, delivers performance that's genuinely useful for real coding tasks. This isn't a toy or a proof of concept – it's ready for coding agents and it can be run entirely on your hardware.The model brings 256k native context, strong tool-use capabilities, and repository-scale understanding. Combined with Cline's compact prompt system (designed specifically for local models at 10% the length), you get an agent that can handle substantial coding tasks without ever touching the cloud.What you needThe setup is straightforward:For Mac users with Apple Silicon, the MLX build is optimized for your hardware. Windows users (& everyone else) get excellent performance with the GGUF build. LM Studio automatically suggests the right format for your platform.Setting up LM StudioStart by downloading the model. In LM Studio, search for "qwen3-coder-30b" and select Qwen3 Coder 30B A3B Instruct. The platform will recommend MLX for Mac and GGUF for Windows – both work excellently.Choose the right quantization depending on your hardware. For my 36B RAM Mac, this meant the 4-bit quantized modelFor local models, quantization is the process of reducing the precision of a model's weights (numbers) to a smaller set of integers or lower-precision floating-point values, which makes the model smaller in file size and memory, faster to run, and thus more feasible to use on consumer...