I tested briefly with a MacBook Pro m4 with 36gb. Run in LM Studio with open code as the frontend and it failed over and over on tool calls. Switched back to qwen. Anyone else on similar setup have better luck?
Yes, you can use it for local coding. Most harnesses can be pointed at a local endpoint which provides an OpenAI compatible API, though I've had some trouble using recent versions of Codex with llama.cpp due to an API incompatibility (Codex uses the newer "responses" API, but in a way that llama.cpp hasn't fully supported).
I personally prefer Pi as I like the fact that it's minimalist and extensible. But some people just use Claude Code, some OpenCode, there are a ton of options out there and most of them can be used with local models.
There is virtually no reason to use Ollama over LM Studio or the myriad of other alternatives.
Ollama is slower and they started out as a shameless llama.cpp ripoff without giving credit and now they “ported” it to Go which means they’re just vibe code translating llama.cpp, bugs included.
I don't think it does, but llama.cpp does, and can load models off HuggingFace directly (so, not limited to ollama's unofficial model mirror like ollama is).
I really like LM Studio when I can use it under Windows but for people like me with Intel Macs + AMD gpu ollama is the only option because it can leverage the gpu using MoltenVK aka Vulkan, unofficially. We're still testing it, hoping to get the Vulkan support in the main branch soon. It works perfectly for single GPUs but some edge cases when using multiple GPUs are unsupported until upstream support from MoltenVK comes through. But yeah, I agree, it wasn't cool to repackage Georgi's work like that.
In some places in the source code they claim sole ownership of the code, when it is highly derivative of that in llama.cpp (having started its life as a llama.cpp frontend). They keep it the same license, however, MIT.
There is no reason to use Ollama as an alternative to llama.cpp, just use the real thing instead.
Why is ollama so many people’s go-to? Genuinely curious, I’ve tried it but it feels overly stripped down / dumbed down vs nearly everything else I’ve used.
Lately I’ve been playing with Unsloth Studio and think that’s probably a much better “give it to a beginner” default.
Ollama is good enough to dabble with, and getting a model is as easy as ollama pull <model name> vs figuring it out by yourself on hugging face and trying to make sense on all the goofy letters and numbers between the forty different names of models, and not needing a hugging face account to download.
So you start there and eventually you want to get off the happy path, then you need to learn more about the server and it's all so much more complicated than just using ollama. You just want to try models, not learn the intricacies of hosting LLMs.
Ollama's org had people flood various LLM/programming related Reddits and Discords and elsewhere, claiming it was an 'easy frontend for llama.cpp', and tricked people.
Only way to win is to uninstall it and switch to llama.cpp.
Ollama got some first-mover advantage at the time when actually building and git pulling llama.cpp was a bit of a moat. The devs' docker past probably made them overestimate how much they could lay claim to mindshare. However, no one really could have known how quickly things would evolve... Now I mostly recommend LM-studio to people.
LM Studio has been around longer. I’ve used it since three years ago. I’d also agree it is generally a better beginner choice then and now.
Unsloth Studio is more featureful (well integrated tool calling, web search, and code execution being headline features), and comes from the people consistently making some of the best GGUF quants of all popular models. It also is well documented, easy to setup, and also has good fine-tuning support.
In case someone would like to know what these are like on this hardware, I tested Gemma 4 32b (the ~20 GB model, the largest Gemma model Google published) and Gemma 4 gemma4:e4b (the ~10 GB model) on this exact setup (Mac Mini M4 with 24 GB of RAM using Ollama), I livestreamed it:
The ~10 GB model is super speedy, loading in a few seconds and giving responses almost instantly. If you just want to see its performance, it says hello around the 2 minute mark in the video (and fast!) and the ~20 GB model says hello around 5 minutes 45 seconds in the video. You can see the difference in their loading times and speed, which is a substantial difference. I also had each of them complete a difficult coding task, they both got it correct but the 20 GB model was much slower. It's a bit too slow to use on this setup day to day, plus it would take almost all the memory. The 10 GB model could fit comfortably on a Mac Mini 24 GB with plenty of RAM left for everything else, and it seems like you can use it for small-size useful coding tasks.
By desk you mean that "Mac mini"? Because it is pricey. In my country it is 1000 USD (from Apple for basic M4 with 24GB). My desk was 1/5th of that price.
And considering that this Mac mini won't be doing anything else is there a reason why not just buy subscription from Claude, OpenAI, Google, etc.?
Are those open models more performant compared to Sonnet 4.5/4.6? Or have at least bigger context?
Right now, open models that run on hardware that costs under $5000 can get up to around the performance of Sonnet 3.7. Maybe a bit better on certain tasks if you fine tune them for that specific task or distill some reasoning ability from Opus, but if you look at a broad range of benchmarks, that's about where they land in performance.
You can get open models that are competitive with Sonnet 4.6 on benchmarks (though some people say that they focus a bit too heavily on benchmarks, so maybe slightly weaker on real-world tasks than the benchmarks indicate), but you need >500 GiB of VRAM to run even pretty aggressive quantizations (4 bits or less), and to run them at any reasonable speed they need to be on multi-GPU setups rather than the now discontinued Mac Studio 512 GiB.
The big advantage is that you have full control, and you're not paying a $200/month subscription and still being throttled on tokens, you are guaranteed that your data is not being used to train models, and you're not financially supporting an industry that many people find questionable. Also, if you want to, you can use "abliterated" versions which strip away the censoring that labs do to cause their models to refuse to answer certain questions, or you can use fine-tunes that adapt it for various other purposes, like improving certain coding abilities, making it better for roleplay, etc.
I have the same setup (M4 Pro, 24GB). The e4b model is surprisingly snappy for quick tasks. The full 26B is usable but not great — loading time alone is enough to break your flow.
Re: subscriptions vs local — I use both. Cloud for the heavy stuff, local for when I'm iterating fast and don't want to deal with rate limits or network hiccups.
I personally prefer Pi as I like the fact that it's minimalist and extensible. But some people just use Claude Code, some OpenCode, there are a ton of options out there and most of them can be used with local models.
Ollama is slower and they started out as a shameless llama.cpp ripoff without giving credit and now they “ported” it to Go which means they’re just vibe code translating llama.cpp, bugs included.
There is no reason to ever use ollama.
I just checked their docs and can't see anything like it.
Did you mistake the command to just download and load the model?
And didn't Ollama independently ship a vision pipeline for some multimodal models months before llama.cpp supported it?
Hmm, the fact that Ollama is open-source, can run in Docker, etc.?
In some places in the source code they claim sole ownership of the code, when it is highly derivative of that in llama.cpp (having started its life as a llama.cpp frontend). They keep it the same license, however, MIT.
There is no reason to use Ollama as an alternative to llama.cpp, just use the real thing instead.
Lately I’ve been playing with Unsloth Studio and think that’s probably a much better “give it to a beginner” default.
So you start there and eventually you want to get off the happy path, then you need to learn more about the server and it's all so much more complicated than just using ollama. You just want to try models, not learn the intricacies of hosting LLMs.
Ollama's org had people flood various LLM/programming related Reddits and Discords and elsewhere, claiming it was an 'easy frontend for llama.cpp', and tricked people.
Only way to win is to uninstall it and switch to llama.cpp.
What does unsloth-studio bring on top?
Unsloth Studio is more featureful (well integrated tool calling, web search, and code execution being headline features), and comes from the people consistently making some of the best GGUF quants of all popular models. It also is well documented, easy to setup, and also has good fine-tuning support.
https://www.youtube.com/live/G5OVcKO70ns
The ~10 GB model is super speedy, loading in a few seconds and giving responses almost instantly. If you just want to see its performance, it says hello around the 2 minute mark in the video (and fast!) and the ~20 GB model says hello around 5 minutes 45 seconds in the video. You can see the difference in their loading times and speed, which is a substantial difference. I also had each of them complete a difficult coding task, they both got it correct but the 20 GB model was much slower. It's a bit too slow to use on this setup day to day, plus it would take almost all the memory. The 10 GB model could fit comfortably on a Mac Mini 24 GB with plenty of RAM left for everything else, and it seems like you can use it for small-size useful coding tasks.
brew install llama.cpp
use the inbuilt CLI, Server or Chat interface. + Hook it up to any other app
And considering that this Mac mini won't be doing anything else is there a reason why not just buy subscription from Claude, OpenAI, Google, etc.?
Are those open models more performant compared to Sonnet 4.5/4.6? Or have at least bigger context?
You can get open models that are competitive with Sonnet 4.6 on benchmarks (though some people say that they focus a bit too heavily on benchmarks, so maybe slightly weaker on real-world tasks than the benchmarks indicate), but you need >500 GiB of VRAM to run even pretty aggressive quantizations (4 bits or less), and to run them at any reasonable speed they need to be on multi-GPU setups rather than the now discontinued Mac Studio 512 GiB.
The big advantage is that you have full control, and you're not paying a $200/month subscription and still being throttled on tokens, you are guaranteed that your data is not being used to train models, and you're not financially supporting an industry that many people find questionable. Also, if you want to, you can use "abliterated" versions which strip away the censoring that labs do to cause their models to refuse to answer certain questions, or you can use fine-tunes that adapt it for various other purposes, like improving certain coding abilities, making it better for roleplay, etc.
Re: subscriptions vs local — I use both. Cloud for the heavy stuff, local for when I'm iterating fast and don't want to deal with rate limits or network hiccups.