64GB isn't the dead zone anymore if you run agents

https://preview.redd.it/hboxdgjh2xyh1.png?width=1230&format=png&auto=webp&s=cca6b2b7b08807a334ff5280e19d96133667fbb0 The usual advice was that 64GB is a dead zone for local LLMs: too small for a 70B with real context, and more than a 30B needs. After running a 27B for agentic coding on a 64GB M4 Max for the last ten days, I think that has flipped. My memory usage is in the 50 GB as the context starts building up. Setup: Qwen3.8 27B (16 GB MLX quant) in LM Studio, 256k context, coding agent sessions that sit at 100-200k tokens. At 164k tokens, LM Studio's engine process is using 48 GB, 46 GB of