🚨 UPDATE: FIXED IT! 🤖 Local LLM + VS Code = Not Autonomous (Yet?)

🚨 UPDATE: FIXED IT! 🤖 Local LLM + VS Code = Not Autonomous (Yet?) | OpenCode vs. Claude Code

It turns out this wasn't an architectural limitation of VS Code extensions—it was a combination of using a model that was too small for agentic tasks, and a misconfigured context window that was suffocating my hardware.

Here is exactly what I was doing wrong and how to fix it to get that true "Claude Code" autonomous experience locally:

1. The Model was Too Small for Tool-Calling I was using qwen2.5-coder:latest (which defaults to the 7B version). The 7B model is great for fast autocomplete, but it is fundamentally too small to reliably format the hidden JSON tool calls required to autonomously read and write files.

The Fix: I switched to qwen3-coder:30b (an agent-tier model). The qwen2.5-coder:32b-instruct-q4_K_M would have also worked perfectly. Once you cross that 30B parameter threshold, the model is smart enough to actually use the VS Code extension's file-system tools on its own.

2. The Context Window was Crashing My RAM Even with the 30B model, it was initially taking over 3 minutes to read a file. Why? Because the VS Code extension (and Ollama GUI) was defaulting to an insane 256k-token context window.

Asking a 30B model to hold 256k tokens of memory caused its size to balloon to 45GB.

It overflowed my 32GB of RAM, spilled entirely onto my SSD pagefile, and bogged down my CPU trying to swap data.

The Fix: I clamped the maximum context window down to 32k tokens. The model now runs flawlessly at 20GB, fits entirely inside my physical RAM and GPU VRAM, and operates at blazing-fast speeds.

Conclusion: Yes, you absolutely can get that autonomous, repo-wide Claude Code experience locally in VS Code for free. You just need a 30B+ model and strict context window management!

The Setup:

I installed OpenCode extension in VS Code with Continue running qwen2.5-coder:latest locally.

My goal: get that Claude Code autonomous agent experience (where the LLM reads files, writes code, runs commands, delivers results) but inside VS Code with a local model.

What I Found:OpenCode + Continue don't actually provide autonomous file operations. When I ask it to "read roatan quebecois md files," it: