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

326 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. dboreham ◴[31 Oct 25 16:42 UTC] No.45774012[source]▶
I've run smaller models (I forget which ones, this was about a year ago) on my laptop just to see what happened. I was quite surprised that I could get it to write simple Python programs. Actually very surprised which led me to re-evaluate my thinking on LLMs in general. Anyway, since then I've been using the regular hosted services since for now I don't see a worthwhile tradeoff running models locally. Apart from the hardware needed, I'd expect to be constantly downloading O(100G) model files as they improve on a weekly basis. I don't have the internet capacity to easily facilitate that.