JetBrains launches Junie Local, a free on-device coding agent for M5 Macs

Archive entry: this covers an event from August 24, 2026, and we published it on November 8, 2026. The details come from sources dated at the time and may have changed since.

On August 24, 2026, JetBrains released Junie Local, a way to run its Junie coding agent entirely on the user's Mac, as described in a JetBrains blog post by Dmitry Savelev. It was free, used no tokens or quotas and sent no code off the machine.

What Junie Local involved

• Users enabled it by running /local inside Junie, which downloaded the model, started the local server and switched Junie over.
• The model was Qwen3.6-27B at 4-bit, a download of about 20 GB, and it required an M5 Mac with 64 GB of RAM.
• Using the 8-bit arithmetic instructions of the M5 Neural Accelerator gave around 40% more prefill throughput.
• JetBrains chose Qwen3.6 over Qwen3.8 because 3.8 required reasoning to be enabled, which made tasks roughly four times slower.
• On JetBrains' private test set, Qwen3.6-27B scored on par with Sonnet 4.5 (10,000-token reasoning limit), while GPT-5 at medium effort scored slightly higher.
• Plan mode, guidelines, skills and /commands behaved the same as with cloud models.

What it meant for developers

Developers with a high-end M5 Mac could run a coding agent on their own machine at no per-token cost. The 64 GB RAM requirement limited who could try it, and the comparison with Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 came from JetBrains' own private test set.

Sources

• Junie Can Now Run Entirely on Your Mac - No Credits, No Cloud (JetBrains, August 24, 2026, official)

Written with AI assistance, strictly from the sources listed above. Before it went live, automated checks verified its dates, sources and every language edition.