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

326 points threeturn | 2 comments | 31 Oct 25 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.423s | 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.

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softfalcon ◴[31 Oct 25 16:51 UTC] No.45774107[source]▶
For anyone who wants to see some real workstations that do this, you may want to check out Alex Ziskind's channel on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@AZisk

At this point, pretty much all he does is review workstations for running LLM's and other machine-learning adjacent tasks.

I'm not his target demographic, but because I'm a dev, his videos are constantly recommended to me on YouTube. He's a good presenter and his advice makes a lot of sense.

replies(3): >>45774714 #>>45776249 #>>45778947 #
1. zargon ◴[01 Nov 25 03:10 UTC] No.45778947[source]▶
His reviews are very amateurish and slapdash. He has no test methodology and just throws together random datapoints that can't be compared to anything. In his Pro 6000 video he compares it with an M3 128GB with empty context. Then he runs a large context (a first for him!) on the 6000 and notes how long prompt processing takes, and never mentions the M3 again!
replies(1): >>45781111 #
2. embedding-shape ◴[01 Nov 25 12:25 UTC] No.45781111[source]▶
Seems pretty spot on for what you'd expect from YouTube developers, most of the channels are like that to be honest. Something about "developer" + "youtube" that just seems to spawn low effort content that tries to create drama rather than fair replacements for blog posts that teach you something.