Code Generation with Local Models

I needed a small script to help anonymizing some test data. Nothing fancy, but on my way to ChatGPT I ended up on the “wrong window” — and threw the prompt at Olamma gpt-oss instead. And it surprised me by giving me a solid result quickly. Small local models are the future and being able to run them on hardware you already own is a political statement.

No remote API calls. No burning through tokens/the environment. No company watching. Like a cowboy, just me and my machine.Small, local models that are good enough to be useful and powerful enough to matter.

Mostly, just worked

I ended up trying the prompt with a couple of different models, and then grading the results.

i need a script that will give me at least 1042 distinct but made up show names. they should be funny and grammatically correct and written in typescript

I expected gpt-oss:20b to be the best of the lot, but surprisingly the 5 month old llama3.2 crushed everything on the time dimension: 4 of them got winning results on the first (and only) try:

Code “Quality”

This is silly since it’s a tiny, throw away script but:

Model	AI Quality	Docker Execution	Notes / Errors
gpt-oss:20b	4/5	✅ Success	Clear & well-named; could abstract title generation.
deepseek-r1:32b	3/5	✅ Success	Repeats random-selection logic, refactoring needed.
devstral:24b	4/5	✅ Success	Cleanly organized, avoid duplicate checks.
llama3.2:latest	4/5	✅ Success	Clear, but unused suffixes array and weak modularity.
gemma3:12b	4/5	❌ Failed	TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (forEach)
gemma3:27b	3/5	❌ Failed	ReferenceError: $2 is not defined
mistral-small3.2:24b	3/5	❌ Failed	Syntax error: Expected ”)” but found “count”

This is for TypeScript, they could be better or worse on different languages.

The test code is on github