Writing code models that run on 8 GB

22 models with published weights that fit in 8 GB — a phone, a base iPad, an Air. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 7 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.

The memory of a phone, a base iPad or an entry-level laptop. What fits is small: models of a few billion parameters, quick and cheap to run, good at summarising, classifying and simple extraction, and out of their depth on long reasoning. This is also where on-device makes the most sense, because the alternative is a network round trip for something that takes a moment.

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 8 GB