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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: 0.217s | 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. sharms ◴[31 Oct 25 21:38 UTC] No.45776991[source]▶
FWIW I bought the M4 max with 128GB and it is useful for local LLMs for OCR, I don't find it as useful for coding (ala Codex / Claude Code) with local LLMs. I find that even with GPT 5 / Claude 4.5 Sonnet that trust is low, and local LLMs can lower that just enough to not be as useful. The heat is also a factor - Apple makes great hardware, but I don't believe it is designed for continuous usage the way a desktop is.