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Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop

326 points threeturn | 2 comments | 31 Oct 25 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.496s | source

Dear Hackers, I’m interested in your real-world workflows for using open-source LLMs and open-source coding assistants on your laptop (not just cloud/enterprise SaaS). Specifically:

Which model(s) are you running (e.g., Ollama, LM Studio, or others) and which open-source coding assistant/integration (for example, a VS Code plugin) you’re using?

What laptop hardware do you have (CPU, GPU/NPU, memory, whether discrete GPU or integrated, OS) and how it performs for your workflow?

What kinds of tasks you use it for (code completion, refactoring, debugging, code review) and how reliable it is (what works well / where it falls short).

I'm conducting my own investigation, which I will be happy to share as well when over.

Thanks! Andrea.

1. juujian ◴[31 Oct 25 15:34 UTC] No.45773231[source]▶
I passed on the machine, but we set up gpt-oss-120b on a 128GB RAM Macbook pro and it is shockingly usable. Personally, I could imagine myself using that instead of OpenAI's web interface. The Ollama UI has web search working, too, so you don't have to worry about the model knowing the latest and greatest about every software package. Maybe one day I'll get the right drivers to run a local model on my Linux machine with AMD's NPU, too, but AMD has been really slow on this.
replies(1): >>45773563 #
2. j45 ◴[31 Oct 25 15:59 UTC] No.45773563[source]▶
LM Studio also works well on Mac.