A guide to local coding models • Hacker News Board

Re: A guide to local coding models

#31

Post by satvikpendem » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:47 PM UTC

a_victorp wrote: post #6

nzeid wrote: post #2

I appreciate the author's modesty but the flip-flopping was a little confusing. If I'm not mistaken, the conclusion is that by "self-hosting" you save money in all cases, but you cripple performance in scenarios where you need to squeeze out the kind of quality that requires hardware that's impractical to cobble together at home or within a laptop. I am still toying with the notion of assembling an LLM tower with a f…

If you ever do it, please make a guide! I've been toying with the same notion myself

Jeff Geerling has (not quite but sort of) guides: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338016

Re: A guide to local coding models

#32

Post by behnamoh » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:47 PM UTC

thehamkercat wrote: post #16

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMStudio is so much better than Ollama it's silly it's not more popular.

LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is but people should use llama.cpp instead

> LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is

and why should that affect usage? it's not like ollama users fork the repo before installing it.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#33

Post by thehamkercat » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #26

thehamkercat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should mention that LM Studio isn't open source. I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself?

Depends what people use them for, not every user of local models is doing so for privacy, some just don't like paying for online models.

Most LLM sites are now offering free plans, and they are usually better than what you can run locally, So I think people are running local models for privacy 99% of the time

Re: A guide to local coding models

#34

Post by satvikpendem » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #25

What are you doing with these models that you’re going above free tier on copilot?

Some just like privacy and working without internet, I for example travel regularly on the train and like to have my laptop when there's not always good WiFi.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#35

Post by behnamoh » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

thehamkercat wrote: post #24

simonw wrote: post #5

This story talks about MLX and Ollama but doesn't mention LM Studio - https://lmstudio.ai/ LM Studio can run both MLX and GGUF models but does so from an Ollama style (but more full-featured) macOS GUI. They also have a very actively maintained model catalog at https://lmstudio.ai/models

I think you should mention that LM Studio isn't open source. I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself?

> I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself?

and you think ollama doesn't do telemetry/etc. just because it's open source?

Re: A guide to local coding models

#36

Post by thehamkercat » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #32

thehamkercat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is but people should use llama.cpp instead

> LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is and why should that affect usage? it's not like ollama users fork the repo before installing it.

It was worth mentioning.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#37

Post by thehamkercat » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #35

thehamkercat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should mention that LM Studio isn't open source. I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself?

> I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself? and you think ollama doesn't do telemetry/etc. just because it's open source?

That's why i suggested using llama.cpp in my other comment.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#38

Post by andix » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

I wouldn't run local models on the development PC. Instead run them on a box in another room or another location. Less fan noise and it won't influence the performance of the pc you're working on.

Latency is not an issue at all for LLMs, even a few hundred ms won't matter.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, except when working offline while traveling.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#39

Post by jwpapi » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #4

> I realized I looked at this more from the angle of a hobbiest paying for these coding tools. Someone doing little side projects—not someone in a production setting. I did this because I see a lot of people signing up for $100/mo or $200/mo coding subscriptions for personal projects when they likely don’t need to. Are people really doing that? If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans fr…

Not everybody is broke.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#40

Post by smcleod » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:50 PM UTC

thehamkercat wrote: post #16

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMStudio is so much better than Ollama it's silly it's not more popular.

LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is but people should use llama.cpp instead

I suspect Ollama is at least partly moving away open source as they look to raise capitol, when they released their replacement desktop app they did so as closed source. You're absolutely right that people should be using llama.cpp - not only is it truly open source but it's significantly faster, has better model support, many more features, better maintained and the development community is far more active.