Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory

Local LLMs work best as supervised coding assistants. The writer ran Qwen 3.5 9B (Q4) in LM Studio on a 24GB MacBook Pro and got about 40 tokens per second, with thinking mode, tool use, and a 128K context window. The author saw mixed results: Qwen helped with simple Elixir linter edits, then failed a basic git conflict by leaving conflict markers in place and trying to continue the rebase.