Developers

When you use GitHub Copilot, your code is sent to Microsoft's servers for inference. When you paste code into Claude, it's transmitted to Anthropic's infrastructure. This isn't speculation — it's how these products work architecturally.

For developers working on proprietary algorithms, client codebases, or anything under NDA, that's a meaningful exposure. Your code represents your work and your clients' trust. Sending it to a third party's AI pipeline isn't obviously the right call.

Local AI with Cline in VS Code gives you the same quality of assistance — multi-file edits, codebase understanding, function generation, refactoring — but the model runs on hardware you own. Your source code is read locally, processed locally, and the edits are applied locally.

With Qwen 2.5-Coder 32B running on a Mac Studio, the quality is genuinely comparable to Copilot. It's not a compromise; it's a choice about where the inference happens.