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

326 points threeturn | 3 comments | 31 Oct 25 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.703s | 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. hacker_homie ◴[31 Oct 25 16:29 UTC] No.45773885[source]▶
Any halo strix laptop, I have been using the hp zbook ultra g1a with 128gb of unified memory. Mostly with the 20B parameters models but it can load larger ones. I find local models (gpt oss 20B) are good quick references but if you want to refactor or something like that you need a bigger model. I’m running llama.cpp directly and using the api it offers for neovim’s avante plugin, or a cli tool like aichat, it comes with a basic web interface as well.
replies(1): >>45773925 #
2. zamadatix ◴[31 Oct 25 16:33 UTC] No.45773925[source]▶
Do you run into hibernation/sleep issues under current mainline Linux kernels by chance? I have this laptop and that's the only thing which isn't working out of the box for me on the Linux side, but it works fine in Windows. I know it's officially supported under the Ubuntu LTS, but I was hoping that wouldn't be needed as I do want a newer+customized kernel.
replies(1): >>45775569 #
3. hacker_homie ◴[31 Oct 25 19:08 UTC] No.45775569[source]▶
Under current kernels (6.17) it seems there is an issue with the webcam driver, https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220702 . looks like there are still some issues with sleep/webcam at this time, they might be fixed by the 6.18 release.

I got sleep working by disabling webcam in the bios for now.