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MCP in LM Studio

lmstudio.ai

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Re: MCP in LM Studio

#52

Post by xyc »

ijk wrote: post #46
mhast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "Tools as a service", so it's really trying to make tool calling easier to use.

Near as I can tell it's supposed to make calling other people's tools easier. But I don't want to spin up an entire server to invoke a calculator. So far it seems to make building my own local tools harder, unless there's some guidebook I'm missing.

It's a protocol that doesn't dictate how you are calling the tool. You can use in-memory transport without needing to spin up a server. Your tool can just be a function, but with the flexibility of serving to other clients.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#53

Post by xyc »

Great to see more local AI tools supporting MCP! Recently I've also added MCP support to recurse.chat. When running locally (LLaMA.cpp and Ollama) it still needs to catch up in terms of tool calling capabilities (for example tool call accuracy / parallel tool calls) compared to the well known providers but it's starting to get pretty usable.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#54

Post by hnuser123456 »

minimaxir wrote: post #11
dchest wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But 8GB of Apple RAM is 16GB of normal RAM.

https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-vp-says-8gb-ram-on-a-macbook-p...

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#55

Post by marci »

zackify wrote: post #36
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 love LM studio but I’d never waste 12k like that. The memory bandwidth is too low trust me. Get the RTX Pro 6000 for 8.5k with double the bandwidth. It will be way better

You can't run deepseek-v3/r1 on the RTX Pro 6000, not to mention the upcomming 1 million context qwen models, or the current qwen3-235b.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#56

Post by tymscar »

zackify wrote: post #36
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 love LM studio but I’d never waste 12k like that. The memory bandwidth is too low trust me. Get the RTX Pro 6000 for 8.5k with double the bandwidth. It will be way better

Why would they pay 2/3 of the price for something with 1/5 of ram?

The whole point of spending that much money for them is to run massive models, like the full R1, which the Pro 6000 cant

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#58

Post by prettyblocks »

s1mplicissimus wrote: post #43
prettyblocks wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using openwebui and am pretty happy with it. Why do you like lm studio more?

i recently tried openwebui but it was so painful to get it to run with local model. that "first run experience" of lm studio is pretty fire in comparison. can't really talk about actually working with it though, still waiting for the 8GB download

Interesting. I run my local llms through ollama and it's zero trouble to get that working in openwebui as long as the ollama server is running.

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#59

Post by rshemet »

xyc wrote: post #53

Great to see more local AI tools supporting MCP! Recently I've also added MCP support to recurse.chat. When running locally (LLaMA.cpp and Ollama) it still needs to catch up in terms of tool calling capabilities (for example tool call accuracy / parallel tool calls) compared to the well known providers but it's starting to get pretty usable.

hey! we're building Cactus (https://github.com/cactus-compute), effectively Ollama for smartphones.

I'd love to learn more about your MCP implementation. Wanna chat?

Re: MCP in LM Studio

#60

Post by t1amat »

politelemon wrote: post #39

The initial experience with LMStudio and MCP doesn't seem to be great, I think their docs could do with a happy path demo for newcomers. Upon installing the first model offered is google/gemma-3-12b - which in fairness is pretty decent compared to others. It's not obvious how to show the right sidebar they're talking about, it's the flask icon which turns into a collapse icon when you click it. I set the MCP up with…

Gemma3 models can follow instructions but were not trained to call tools, which is the backbone of MCP support. You would likely have a better experience with models from the Qwen3 family.
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