Writing code models that run on 256 GB

76 models with published weights that fit in 256 GB — a Mac Studio with 256. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 274 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.

A Mac Studio at the top of its configuration, or a serious machine. Almost everything openly published fits, including the large mixtures of experts. At this point the constraint is no longer whether the model loads but whether it generates fast enough to be worth waiting for.

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.

Wider

Writing code models Models that run on 256 GB