Run Cursor on a Local Model — Point the IDE at Your Own Mac

Cursor, but the model's running on your own Mac. One custom base URL in Settings → Models and chat, Ctrl-K, and composer all route to a local model — private, offline, no per-token bill.

Jul 21, 2026 · 3 min read

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Cursor is where a lot of us live now, and its AI is genuinely good. But every completion, every Ctrl-K, every composer run goes to the cloud and gets billed. For a lot of day-to-day editing — refactors, explain-this, small features — you don't need a frontier model in a datacenter. You need a capable one on your Mac, wired into the editor you already use.

This is the second in a short series on pointing your favorite agent at a local model. (First up was Claude Code.) Cursor takes about five minutes.

Your code stays local. Cursor's chat and composer stop shipping your files to the cloud.
No meter. Once the model's on disk, editing all day costs nothing.
It just works. rapid-mlx serves the OpenAI wire Cursor expects — you're changing one URL, not installing a bridge.

The whole thing

brew install rapid-mlx
rapid-mlx serve qwen3.6-35b-4bit
Cursor → Settings → Models → set the OpenAI base URL to http://localhost:8000/v1

1 · Install rapid-mlx

Local, OpenAI-compatible inference for Apple Silicon. It's in Homebrew core:

brew install rapid-mlx

2 · Serve a model that fits your Mac

rapid-mlx serve qwen3.6-35b-4bit

The server comes up at http://localhost:8000. First run downloads the weights; after that it's seconds.

Your Mac	Model	Good for
16 GB	`qwen3.5-4b`	Fast edits, Q&A
32 GB	`gpt-oss-20b`	All-round + strong tools
48 GB+	`qwen3.6-35b-4bit`	The coding sweet spot

No tool flags needed. Since 0.10.14, serve auto-configures the tool-call parser and turns on grammar-constrained tool calling — Cursor's composer, which leans on tool calls, gets clean results with nothing to set.

3 · Point Cursor at it

Open Settings → Models → Add Model, then set:

OpenAI API Base:  http://localhost:8000/v1
API Key:          not-needed
Model name:       default        # or any served alias, e.g. qwen3.6-35b-4bit

The base URL ends in /v1 here — that's the OpenAI shape Cursor speaks. (Claude Code is the opposite: it wants the bare root. Different wires.) And if Cursor's dropdown hides an alias it doesn't recognize, pick default — it always resolves to whatever the server booted.

4 · Use it

Pick default from the model dropdown. Now chat, Ctrl-K, and composer route to http://localhost:8000/v1 — running on your Mac. Ask it to explain a function, refactor a file, or scaffold a component; it reads and edits in the editor as usual.

What this covers — and what it doesn't

Cursor's interactive surfaces — chat, Ctrl-K, and composer — honor the custom endpoint. Cursor's fully-managed background agent routes through Cursor's own backend and can't be pointed at a local server. So this covers the editing you do by hand all day; the autonomous cloud agent stays cloud. For a fully local agent loop, Claude Code or Codex is the better fit.

Honest expectations. A model on your Mac isn't a frontier cloud model. Where local shines: private and offline work, quick edits, explain-and-refactor, and never watching a bill. Where the cloud still wins: the hardest reasoning and the largest context. You don't have to pick one — switch Cursor's model back anytime.

Where to go next

Full Cursor guide — settings, model dropdown notes, and the agent-path caveat in detail.
Claude Code → local — the fully-local CLI agent.
Integration matrix — every agent × the four Tier-1 families.
Install rapid-mlx — Homebrew or one curl. Apache 2.0.

Run this yourself. rapid-mlx is an open-source, OpenAI-compatible inference server for Apple Silicon. pip install rapid-mlx, then rapid-mlx serve <alias>. Browse every supported model on the family docs or pick one by your Mac's RAM at models.rapidmlx.com.