The initial experience with LMStudio and MCP doesn't seem to be great, I think their docs could do with a happy path demo for newcomers.
Upon installing the first model offered is google/gemma-3-12b - which in fairness is pretty decent compared to others.
It's not obvious how to show the right sidebar they're talking about, it's the flask icon which turns into a collapse icon when you click it.
I set the MCP up with playwright, asked it to read the top headline from HN and it got stuck on an infinite loop of navigating to Hacker News, but doing nothing with the output.
I wanted to try it out with a few other models, but figuring out how to download new models isn't obvious either, it turned out to be the search icon. Anyway other models didn't fare much better either, some outright ignored the tools despite having the capacity for 'tool use'.
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