JetBrains ships Junie Local, a free on-device coding agent that needs an M5 Mac with 64GB
JetBrains released Junie Local, which runs Qwen3.6-27B at 4-bit entirely on-device after a single /local command — free, no registration, no credits, and scoring on par with Sonnet 4.5 on JetBrains' private test set with reasoning disabled. A developer with an M5 Mac and 64GB of RAM can now hand an agent unmetered multifile refactors, dependency upgrades, and test-coverage backfills offline, with no vendor data policy in the loop; the hardware floor puts it out of reach for most, and complex architectural reasoning still trails the cloud models.
Source: blog.jetbrains.com ↗
When one more iteration is free, work you would never usually spend credits on becomes worth handing over.
JetBrains
Why this matters
- → On-device coding agents eliminate vendor data policies entirely — no cloud involvement means client NDAs no lo
- → Unmetered iterations unlock mechanical work usually skipped: multifile refactors, test coverage backfills, dep
- → M5 Mac requirement (64GB RAM) narrows adoption sharply; most developers cannot run it locally today.
Offline coding agents arrive