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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: 0.631s | 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. erikig ◴[31 Oct 25 18:46 UTC] No.45775325[source]▶
Hardware: MacBook Pro M4 Max, 128GB

Platform: LMStudio (primarily) & Ollama

Models:

- qwen/qwen3-coder-30b A3B Instruct 8-bit MLX

- mlx-community/gpt-oss-120b-MXFP4-Q8

For code generation especially for larger projects, these models aren't as good as the cutting edge foundation models. For summarizing local git repos/libraries, generating documentation and simple offline command-line tool-use they do a good job.

I find these communities quite vibrant and helpful too:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/

- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

replies(2): >>45775846 #>>45778011 #
2. mkagenius ◴[31 Oct 25 19:36 UTC] No.45775846[source]▶
Since you are on Mac, if you need some kind code execution sandbox, check out Coderunner[1] which is based on Apple container, provides a way execute any LLM generated cod e without risking arbitrary code execution on your machine.

I have recently added claude skills to it. So, all the claude skills can be executed locally on your mac too.

1. https://github.com/instavm/coderunner

3. shell0x ◴[31 Oct 25 23:56 UTC] No.45778011[source]▶
I have a Mac Studio with the M4 Max and 128GB RAM

The Qwen3-coder model you use is pretty good. You can enable the LM Studio API and install the qwen CLI and point to the API endpoint. This basically gives you functionality similar to Claude code.

I agree that the code quality is not on part with gpt5-codex and Claude. I also haven't tried z.ai's models locally yet. I think on a Mac with that size GLM 4.5 Air should be able to run.

For README generation I like gemma3-27b-it-qat and gpt-oss-120b.