Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MCP in LM Studio

lmstudio.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 156 posts

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#11

Post by minimaxir »

dchest wrote: post #6
chisleu wrote: post #2

Just ordered a $12k mac studio w/ 512GB of integrated RAM. Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to download it with safari. LM Studio is newish, and it's not a perfect interface yet, but it's fantastic at what it does which is bring local LLMs to the masses w/o them having to know much. There is another project that people should be aware of: https://github.c…

I'm using it on MacBook Air M1 / 8 GB RAM with Qwen3-4B to generate summaries and tags for my vibe-coded Bloomberg Terminal-style RSS reader :-) It works fine (the laptop gets hot and slow, but fine). Probably should just use llama.cpp server/ollama and not waste a gig of memory on Electron, but I like GUIs.

8 GB of RAM with local LLMs in general is iffy: a 8-bit quantized Qwen3-4B is 4.2GB on disk and likely more in memory. 16 GB is usually the minimum to be able to run decent models without compromising on heavy quantization.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#12

Post by incognito124 »

chisleu wrote: post #2

Just ordered a $12k mac studio w/ 512GB of integrated RAM. Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to download it with safari. LM Studio is newish, and it's not a perfect interface yet, but it's fantastic at what it does which is bring local LLMs to the masses w/o them having to know much. There is another project that people should be aware of: https://github.c…

> I'm going to download it with Safari

Oof you were NOT joking

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#13

Post by patates »

What models are you using on LM Studio for what task and with how much memory?

I have a 48GB macbook pro and Gemma3 (one of the abliterated ones) fits my non-code use case perfectly (generating crime stories which the reader tries to guess the killer).

For code, I still call Google to use Gemini.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#14

Post by pzo »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

LM Studio has quickly become the best way to run local LLMs on an Apple Silicon Mac: no offense to vllm/ollama and other terminal-based approaches, but LLMs have many levers for tweaking output and sometimes you need a UI to manage it. Now that LM Studio supports MLX models, it's one of the most efficient too. I'm not bullish on MCP, but at the least this approach gives a good way to experiment with it for free.

I just wish they did some facelifting of UI. Right now is too colorfull for me and many different shades of similar colors. I wish they copy some color pallet from google ai studio or from trae or pycharm.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#15

Post by sneak »

chisleu wrote: post #2

Just ordered a $12k mac studio w/ 512GB of integrated RAM. Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to download it with safari. LM Studio is newish, and it's not a perfect interface yet, but it's fantastic at what it does which is bring local LLMs to the masses w/o them having to know much. There is another project that people should be aware of: https://github.c…

I already got one of these. I’m spoiled by Claude 4 Opus; local LLMs are slower and lower quality.

I haven’t been using it much. All it has on it is LM Studio, Ollama, and Stats.app.

> Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to download it with safari.

lol, yup. same.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#16

Post by teaearlgraycold »

chisleu wrote: post #2

Just ordered a $12k mac studio w/ 512GB of integrated RAM. Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to download it with safari. LM Studio is newish, and it's not a perfect interface yet, but it's fantastic at what it does which is bring local LLMs to the masses w/o them having to know much. There is another project that people should be aware of: https://github.c…

What are you going to do with the LLMs you run?

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#17

Post by [deleted] »

patates wrote: post #13

What models are you using on LM Studio for what task and with how much memory? I have a 48GB macbook pro and Gemma3 (one of the abliterated ones) fits my non-code use case perfectly (generating crime stories which the reader tries to guess the killer). For code, I still call Google to use Gemini.

[deleted]

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#18

Post by api »

I wish LM Studio had a pure daemon mode. It's better than ollama in a lot of ways but I'd rather be able to use BoltAI as the UI, as well as use it from Zed and VSCode and aider.

What I like about ollama is that it provides a self-hosted AI provider that can be used by a variety of things. LM Studio has that too, but you have to have the whole big chonky Electron UI running. Its UI is powerful but a lot less nice than e.g. BoltAI for casual use.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#19

Post by chisleu »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #16
chisleu wrote: post #2

Just ordered a $12k mac studio w/ 512GB of integrated RAM. Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to download it with safari. LM Studio is newish, and it's not a perfect interface yet, but it's fantastic at what it does which is bring local LLMs to the masses w/o them having to know much. There is another project that people should be aware of: https://github.c…

What are you going to do with the LLMs you run?

Currently I'm using gemini 2.5 and claude 3.7 sonnet for coding tasks.

I'm interested in using models for code generation, but I'm not expecting much in that regard.

I'm planning to attempt fine tuning open source models on certain tool sets, especially MCP tools.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#20

Post by chisleu »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

LM Studio has quickly become the best way to run local LLMs on an Apple Silicon Mac: no offense to vllm/ollama and other terminal-based approaches, but LLMs have many levers for tweaking output and sometimes you need a UI to manage it. Now that LM Studio supports MLX models, it's one of the most efficient too. I'm not bullish on MCP, but at the least this approach gives a good way to experiment with it for free.

> I'm not bullish on MCP

You gotta help me out. What do you see holding it back?

Post reply on HN