Writing code models that run on 16 GB

38 models with published weights that fit in 16 GB — the common laptop. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 16 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.

The commonest laptop configuration, and the point where a genuinely useful model runs locally: fourteen billion parameters at four-bit fits with room to spare for the context. Expect a capable general assistant that will not match the frontier, and remember that anything else the machine is doing competes for the same memory.

Models and agents for reading a codebase and changing it, rather than writing a snippet. The boards that matter here are the ones that run against real repositories — SWE-bench, SWE-rebench, Terminal-Bench — because a model can write a plausible function and still fail to make a test pass. Note whether what you are looking at is a model or an agent: an agent brings the harness, the file access and the loop, and is priced for it.

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Writing code models Models that run on 16 GB