HumanEval on a MacBook — 81.7% pass@1, Wi-Fi off

⚡ TL;DR
  • 🏆 81.7% pass@1 on the full HumanEval — 134 of 164 problems — run by a local model on this MacBook with the Wi-Fi off.
  • ⏱️ 14 minutes wall-clock. Single sample per problem, temperature zero, no retries.
  • 📊 Companion number: MBPP (sanitized) 83.3% pass@1 on a 168-problem sample.
  • 💸 Total monthly cost after the model download: $0 — launchers are open source so you can reproduce the whole run.

That’s not a slide deck. It’s three of the actual HumanEval problems being solved by the local model on this MacBook — prompt on the left, generated code streaming on the right, real test going green at the end.

Final score: 81.7% pass@1. One hundred and thirty-four out of one hundred and sixty-four. Fourteen minutes wall-clock. Single sample per problem, temperature zero, no retries.

81.7%
HumanEval pass@1
134/164
Problems passed
14 min
Wall-clock, full run
$0
Monthly cost

🎯Why anyone should care about this number

The Qwen team didn’t publish HumanEval scores for any Qwen3-Coder variant. They consider the benchmark saturated — and for cloud-served frontier models, fair, it is. They went straight to agentic benchmarks (SWE-bench Verified, BFCL, Aider-Polyglot) and ran them on the flagship 480B sibling.

For the 30B variant — the one that actually fits on a laptop — there were no published HumanEval/MBPP numbers. Until this run.

🔬The methodology, in one screen

Setting Value
BenchmarkHumanEval — 164 Python tasks (full)
Metricpass@1 (first attempt only)
Temperature0.0 — deterministic
Samplingsingle sample per problem, no best-of-N
ExecutionPython subprocess, 10s timeout
HardwareM5 Max MacBook Pro · 128 GB unified memory
ModelQwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-MLX-8bit
NetworkWi-Fi OFF the entire run
Wall clock14 minutes

🧩Three real problems from the run

Picked from the actual results file — these are the problems that play in the video, with the canonical solutions verified to pass:

  1. HumanEval/13 · greatest_common_divisor — model output: while b: a, b = b, a % b; return a · 1.76s · PASS
  2. HumanEval/2 · truncate_number — model output: return number % 1.0 · 1.83s · PASS
  3. HumanEval/14 · all_prefixes — model output: a list comprehension over range(len(string)) · 1.49s · PASS

And 161 more like them. With 30 failures along the way — that’s the honest part. The full results file is in the GitHub repo if you want to see exactly which ones failed.

📊The companion number — MBPP

I also ran MBPP (sanitized): 83.3% pass@1 on a 168-problem sample. Pass rate stable since n=120; full 427-run was impractical because a few outlier tasks induce very long model responses (10+ minutes each — likely repetitive generation patterns). At n=168 the 95% confidence interval is ±5%, so the number is solid.

🏋️For context — the 480B flagship’s agentic numbers

Agentic Benchmark Qwen3-Coder 480B Claude Sonnet 4 GPT-4.1
SWE-bench Verified (500-turn)69.670.4
Terminal-Bench37.535.525.3
BFCL-v368.773.362.9
Aider-Polyglot61.856.452.4

Source: Qwen team’s official blog. The 30B running on this MacBook is a smaller sibling — trades absolute peak agentic ceiling for fitting in 30 GB and running 24/7 on local hardware.

🔁Reproduce it yourself

🏁The stopwatch is real. The Wi-Fi is off.

For law firms, medical practices, and accountants running this on their own hardware — AirGap is what the full private build looks like: the data never leaves your machines, and the whole stack is open source.

— matt


Whose work this stands on

The benchmark is mine. Everything being benchmarked is not.

  • MLX and mlx-lm — Apple’s ml-explore team, who made Apple Silicon a serious place to run models.
  • Qwen — Alibaba’s Qwen team.
  • HumanEval — OpenAI, for the benchmark itself.
  • Claude — Anthropic, the cloud baseline everything here is measured against.

If your work is listed here and you would like the wording changed, write to me and I will fix it.

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