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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure I get this. It seems on first glance like just another harness ...

Ultimately, the onus at every VC backed local LLM startup is to launch a cloud based offering, because that's the only potential path in sight for venture scale returns.

For now, it seems that direction that lm studio is taking for enterprise market is "local ai deployment support". They recently launched "lm link" which basically uses tailscale to create e2ee connections between computers running lm studio where you are logged in. Granted one can also setup tailscale or their own vpn themselves and use llama-server, but I guess it is simpler to provide it out of the box. In any case I am not sure pivoting from running local models to "cloud offering" (as in providing llm inference at their severs) is a sensible choice granted there is already competition in that space and they have no leverage there. The highest expected path imo would be to be bought by a company that makes (esp open weights) llms and has a similar business plan around enterprise contracts with local deployments.

> In any case I am not sure pivoting from running local models to "cloud offering" (as in providing llm inference at their severs) is a sensible choice granted there is already competition in that space and they have no leverage there.

I agree. Incidentally, this is exactly what ollama are doing too.

I can definitely see a world where you run stuff local first, for all the reasons we know. Sometimes, you are going to want more powerful models, faster, you’re travelling, etc. You might only use these 5 to 10% of the time, but I’m guessing that’s the market they want.

But one can already switch models in a harness between llm providers. I doubt such a pivot can get some much traction.

Built to work with lmstudio, one of the leading easy to use local model servers. LMStudio is the closest to plug-and-play without sacrificing play that I've seen; a harness that works well with it is nothing to sniff at. Its not earth shattering either.

I guess it lives or dies by the harness quality then - on open models run locally by plug and players and models that fit onto peoples laptops - that is going to be quite the handicap to overcome.

I run lmstudio personally with a range of harnesses (open and closed) and can't say there is that much of a leap to getting everything talking https://lmstudio.ai/docs/integrations

Maybe they optimized it really hard for small models. That would be impressive, but hardly a good selling argument. I want a harness that can do both and OpenCode looks just fine for that purpose (and it also has everything else I need).

To me this looks like another case of bundling things that shouldn’t be bundled (the harness with the UI) making both worse off because you can’t individually focus on each component. They’ve done this before, bundling a decent UI with decent inference for IMO no good reason, combining the downsides of each instead of letting people mix+match.

Wouldn't most opensource harnesses work with lmstudio? I assume it has an "openai" style chat API like every other model provider? What's special about it vs langchain deep agents or pi or pydantic-ai?

Yes. I don’t see it either. It looks like a competent app (converging on the same principles as others) but what they are advertising as differentiators simply isn’t relevant to its purpose.

How does it work with lmstudio? Its a separate standalone application.

built to work with an OpenAI API compatible endpoint, just like any other harness...

and if someone can't figure out how to write down an address it's very likely they also can't figure out how to make local models not suck for coding, and would likely switch back to codex/cc after 15 minutes anyways.

If you want to use local models, it's more ergonomic than fussing with GGUFs or using LM Studio as a server host and setting up the link to an agent yourself. Although, the model selector is the same as with LM Studio itself which can be overwhelming if you don't know what to look for.

It’s a harness + UI with really confusing messaging. Made for open models ... why specifically? Zero data retention ... well duh, it’s a client????

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