I Ditched GitHub Copilot and Now I Code With AI for Free — Locally

I was paying $10/month for GitHub Copilot. It's fine. It works. But it means every keystroke I type goes to Microsoft's servers, my code context gets shipped off somewhere, and I'm locked into whatever pricing they decide next year. Then I found out I could run a better-than-Copilot setup on my own machine, completely free, with no data leaving my computer. Here's exactly how I did it, and how you can too. What You Actually Need Before anything else — honest expectations: A machine with at least 8GB RAM (16GB is better) ~5GB free disk space per model A decent CPU, or an NVIDIA/Apple Silicon GPU for speed About 20 minutes of setup time No API keys. No credit cards. No subscriptions. Step 1: Install Ollama Ollama is the piece that makes all of this possible. It's basically a runtime that lets you pull and run open-source LLMs the same way Docker lets you run containers. macOS / Linux: curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh Windows: Download the installer from ollama.com . Verify i