16GB on a mac with unified memory is too small for good coding models. Anything on that machine is severely compromised. Maybe in ~1 year we will see better models that fit in ~8gb vram, but not yet.
Right now, for a coding LLM on a Mac, the standard is Qwen 3 32b, which runs great on any M1 mac with 32gb memory or better. Qwen 3 235b is better, but fewer people have 128gb memory.
Anything smaller than 32b, you start seeing a big drop off in quality. Qwen 3 14b Q4_K_M is probably your best option at 16gb memory, but it's significantly worse in quality than 32b.
I have LMStudio installed, and use Continue in VSCode, but it doesn't feel nearly as feature rich compared to using something like Cursor's IDE, or the GitHub Copilot plugin.
Continue can be your autocomplete provider – and use a smaller and faster model. Something like Cline (or Roo or Kilocode or another fork) would be the more Cursor-like assistant there.
Right now, for a coding LLM on a Mac, the standard is Qwen 3 32b, which runs great on any M1 mac with 32gb memory or better. Qwen 3 235b is better, but fewer people have 128gb memory.
Anything smaller than 32b, you start seeing a big drop off in quality. Qwen 3 14b Q4_K_M is probably your best option at 16gb memory, but it's significantly worse in quality than 32b.