←back to thread

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

335 points threeturn | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | 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. Gracana ◴[31 Oct 25 16:42 UTC] No.45774004[source]▶
I don’t own a laptop. I run DeepSeek-V3 IQ4_XS on a Xeon workstation with lots of RAM and a few RTX A4000s.

It’s not very fast, and I built it up slowly without knowing quite where I was headed. If I could do it over again, I’d go with a recent EPYC with 12 channels of DDR5 and pair it with a single RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell.