A free AI that builds apps, tools and games for you — running 100% on your own Mac. The trick is picking the right model, not the biggest.
For months I paid for every single AI message.
So I tried running a model on my own Mac, for free.
The first one felt slow, so I grabbed a bigger one.
The bigger one was worse — it ate all my memory and crawled.
I figured local AI just wasn't fast enough, and gave up.
Then I learned the one thing nobody tells you: the biggest model is not the fastest.
I picked the right-shaped model instead — light, but smart.
Now there's a free AI coder living inside my Mac.
It builds apps, tools and games for me — offline, instant, no bill.
I just say what I want, and watch it appear. That changed everything.
A free AI coder that lives inside your own Mac — fast, private, always on. Five things make it work.
Not the biggest — the right shape. A light model that only fires a small part of itself per word, so it's quick AND smart on your machine.
Keep it sitting in your Mac's memory so it never reloads. The lag people blame on "slow models" is just the cold start — kill it once and it's instant.
It runs on a loop inside your Mac. Your code, your ideas, your prompts — none of it ever touches the internet. Truly private, truly free.
Say "build me a snake game" and it writes the whole thing — then shows it to you running, live. Talk, watch it appear.
Every app, tool and game it builds lands in one workspace on your Mac. Open it, play it, download it — nothing gets lost.
Here's the shift. Most people rent AI by the month and send every keystroke to someone else's server. This is the other way.
This is the bit that took me weeks to figure out.
Everyone assumes a bigger model is a slower model. It's not.
The size of a model is just how much memory it takes up.
The speed is something else entirely: how much of the model has to think for every single word.
An old-style "dense" model wakes up its whole brain for every word. Big and heavy means slow.
A new "MoE" model is a giant brain split into experts — and only a few experts wake up per word. Big brain, tiny effort. Fast.
So the rule is simple: on a Mac, pick a small-but-mighty MoE model that fits in memory with room to spare. Mine is gpt-oss:20b — 12 GB, ~75 words a second, free. The new North Mini Code (Cohere) is even quicker at ~92. Skip the giant dense models — they swap your Mac and crawl.
Even the right model feels slow if you do one thing wrong.
You let it fall asleep between messages.
Then your first question has to drag the whole model back off the disk before it can answer.
That few-second lag is what makes people quit. It's not the thinking — it's the loading.
One setting tells the model to stay in memory. After that, it answers the instant you hit enter.
"Offline" is easy to say. So I tested it.
The model only listens on one address — the loop inside your own Mac.
Then I watched every connection it made while it built a whole app.
There were none. Not one byte went out.
The actual test — where it listens, and every connection it made while building:
This is the part that feels like the future.
You don't even have to type.
Tap the mic and say "build me a snake game."
The engine writes the whole thing — all the code, in one shot.
It shows up live in a preview, right there, running.
And it's saved in your workspace, next to everything else it's built.
A real run — one sentence in, a working game out:
I wired this into the Agent OS — the dashboard where all my agents live on one screen. The Local Code Engine sits right next to the cloud ones, as the free, instant one for quick builds.
link in the description ↗
You need a Mac with a decent chunk of memory (16 GB is plenty for the model below — it sits around 12 GB warm). Then four steps.
It's a free app that runs AI models on your own machine. One download from ollama.com.
A light, fast MoE coder. This downloads it to your disk; after that it's yours forever, offline.
One setting tells the model to stay in memory instead of reloading every time. This is what turns "slow" into "instant."
Send it a quick "hello" so it loads into memory. Check it's warm — and you're live.
Want the fastest coder out right now? Try Cohere's new north-mini-code-1.0 — ~92 words a second, made for building (needs the latest Ollama). Got less memory? llama3.2:3b (~5 GB) is tiny and quick for the simple stuff.
Belief: "Local AI is too slow to be useful."
Truth: Only if you pick the wrong model or let it go cold. The right MoE model builds at 75–92 words a second on a normal Mac — faster than you can read. I proved it: the lag was the cold start, never the thinking.
Belief: "I need the biggest model to get good results."
Truth: Backwards. On my Mac the 28 GB model was the slowest of all — it swapped memory and crawled at 16 words a second. The 12 GB MoE was 5× faster AND built better. Right shape beats big size, every time.
Belief: "Setting up a local model is too technical for me."
Truth: It's one app install and three short commands. If you can copy and paste a line, you can run this. The hard part — making it fast — is a single setting. Ten minutes, start to finish.
3,600+ founders are wiring fast local agents like this inside the Boardroom right now. Their wins — real businesses, real results — are documented here.
Read the member wins →You stopped paying. A free AI coder runs on the Mac you already own — that monthly AI cost is gone.
You stopped guessing on models. Pick a light MoE, not the biggest — fast AND smart, no swapping.
You stopped waiting. Keep it warm and it answers the instant you hit enter — ~75–92 words a second.
You stopped leaking. Nothing you type ever leaves your Mac — proven, zero connections out.
You started building by voice. Say it, watch a whole app appear live, and it saves itself.
You own it. No bill, no limits, no one watching — your own coder, on your own machine.
You've seen it. The right model, kept warm, runs offline and builds whole apps from a sentence. If you want it set up with you — step by step, right next to your cloud agents — it's all inside the AI Profit Boardroom.
I'll see you inside ↗