I expected Claude Code to crush its open-source rival on my 16GB GPU, but that’s not what happened

At first glance, my $20 Claude Pro subscription seemed justified by Claude Code's impressive performance on my 16GB GPU. However, a recent test with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B using OpenCode revealed that the latter performed similarly, proving that powerful local AI coding tools are becoming increasingly accessible. Claude Code, Anthropic's harness running proprietary models, collaborated with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B in Unsloth's UD-IQ4_XS quant, served through llama.cpp runtime.

This setup allowed the 17.7GB model to fit onto my RTX 4070 Ti Super's 16GB GDDR6X memory. Both agents were tasked with creating a Python tool to log GPU metrics, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B completed the task in 3 minutes and 44 seconds, while Claude Code finished in 2 minutes and 42 seconds. Despite the time difference, both agents successfully generated the required Python code, highlighting the significant cost difference between the subscription-based Claude Code ($0.37) and the local Qwen3.6-35B-A3B ($0.0005 per token).