Six months ago, I started running local LLMs seriously on a Mac with 16 GB of unified memory. Most of my decisions were dictated by memory: which models fit, which quantization to use, and how much context I could afford. Moving to 48 GB changed that. Models such as Qwen3.8-27B became practical for everyday use, and my attention shifted toward a different problem: how well does the model work during a real coding-agent session? Memory Was Only the First Constraint My curr...