Restructuring an existing function or module without changing behavior. The cloud coding assistants category answers this with a remote model; Outlier answers it with the on-device Core tier. This page is the side-by-side specifically for refactoring workloads.
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For refactoring, the deciding axis between Outlier and cloud coding assistants is the data path. Hosted code completion and chat tools sold as a plan or subscription. Outlier holds the prompt and response for refactoring on the Mac and delivers tokens at the local memory bandwidth of the chip; on the recommended Core tier, that means working out of the on-disk checkpoint without a network round-trip per turn.
Network round-trip every prompt. For a refactoring workflow against cloud coding assistants, the practical consequences are tail-latency variance (the network adds unbounded variance per turn) and the refactoring prompts leaving your Mac on every request. Outlier’s chat path on the Core tier issues no outbound HTTPS once the model is on disk, and your chats, files and prompts never leave the Mac. The app does go online for a few other things: the one-time 15.13 GB tier download from Hugging Face, the update check, the price shown when an upgrade window opens and, on Pro, the licence check. Web search goes out only if you turn it on (Pro).
If you are coming from cloud coding assistants for refactoring, the right starting point on Outlier is the Core tier: 15.13 GB on disk, sitting at the quality-vs-speed inflection point for refactoring; cloud coding assistants users typically want what they had plus privacy; the Core tier is the closest match for that without giving up answer quality. Heavier work moves up to the higher tiers in the same app; the Quick tier is not the pick for agent-driven work on refactoring, because it produced no patch in any of 50 tries on a blind SWE-bench Verified sample.
Moving a refactoring workflow from cloud coding assistants to Outlier is a one-time DMG install plus a 15.13 GB pull for the Core tier. Outlier has no sign-in step, no per-token meter, and no rate-limit page to redirect through. The Core tier is part of Pro, so you paste a licence key once to activate it; Nano and Lite are the free tiers. The refactoring loop after install is open-prompt to local-decode.
For a refactoring workload moving off cloud coding assistants onto the Core tier: Core is the coding tier. It was briefly split into a separate “Code” entry that shared the identical weights; that split is gone and Core carries the code-first defaults. The MLX explainer has the per-tier breakdown if you want to see how it compares with cloud coding assistants. The measured accuracy figures are on the tier benchmarks page (MMLU for every tier but Plus; HumanEval for Core and Vision 3.8 only), and for refactoring specifically: HumanEval measures writing a function from a description, which is adjacent to but not the same as rewriting one that already exists and must keep its behaviour.
Refactoring runs are long-prompt, long-output: paste a function and ask for the rewrite. Core defaults to a 32K-token context window and goes up to 128K on Pro, so a whole file and its imports usually fit without truncation.
Outlier’s local-only chat path has no sign-in, no auth token and no metered usage: the refactoring workflow runs against the on-disk Core tier, no token leaves the device.
This page positions Outlier as an alternative to cloud coding assistants for refactoring workflows, not as a drop-in replacement. Specific product surfaces in the cloud coding assistants category (IDE-integrated suggestions, web-based shared sessions, team-managed prompt libraries) are out of scope for the local app loop and we do not claim equivalence for those when refactoring is part of a larger team workflow.
For refactoring: one network round-trip per prompt with cloud coding assistants versus zero round-trips with Outlier on the Core tier: the difference is unbounded latency variance against bandwidth-bound, repeatable local throughput.
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Refund window: 30 days, no questions asked.
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