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326 points threeturn | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.239s | 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. nvdnadj92 ◴[] No.45778040[source]
Laptop: Apple M2 Max, 32GB memory (2023)

Setup:

Terminal:

- Ghostty + Starship for modern terminal experience

- Homebrew to install system packages

IDE:

- Zed (can connect to local models via LM-Studio server)

- also experimenting with warp.dev

LLMs:

- LM-studio as open-source model playground

- GPT-OSS 20B

- QWEN3-Coder-30B-AEB-quantized-4bit

- Gemma3-12B

Other utilities:

- Rectangle.app (window tile manager)

- Wispr.flow - create voice notes

- Obsidian - track markdown notes