He Asked His MacBook AI to Build a Game. It Took 63 Hours
You can run powerful AI on a laptop — just be ready to wait days.
A Reddit user tested agentic coding on a MacBook Air using LM Studio Bionic with Qwen 3.8 27B Q3_K_S at 57k context. Coding a flight simulator took a staggering 63 hours. The first prompt produced a title screen that said "press any key," but pressing keys did nothing. A second prompt fixed it, letting the user fly — though there's no plane model and it's a bit buggy. The same prompt on Google AI Studio took 20 minutes and one-shot the game with selectable plane models and a smooth voxel landscape. Qwen Studio took 2 hours and also one-shot it, but the voxel landscape was buggy, rough, and shimmering. The user says this was just for fun, to see if agentic coding is even possible on a MacBook Air, and they're amazed it runs locally even with a 3-bit quant.
- A local AI on a MacBook Air took 63 hours to make a simple game.
- The same task took 20 minutes using Google's cloud AI.
- Running AI at home is possible, but cloud services are far more practical.
Why It Matters
You can keep your data private with local AI, but you'll sacrifice speed and convenience.