[HN Gopher] LM Studio is now an MCP Host
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LM Studio is now an MCP Host
Author : yags
Score : 123 points
Date : 2025-06-25 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lmstudio.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (lmstudio.ai)
| chisleu wrote:
| 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.com/exo-explore/exo
|
| Exo is this radically cool tool that automatically clusters all
| hosts on your network running Exo and uses their combined GPUs
| for increased throughput.
|
| Like HPC environments, you are going to need ultra fast
| interconnects, but it's just IP based.
| dchest wrote:
| 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Nice. Ironically well suited for non-Apple Intelligence.
| incognito124 wrote:
| > I'm going to download it with Safari
|
| Oof you were NOT joking
| noman-land wrote:
| Safari to download LM Studio. LM Studio to download models.
| Models to download Firefox.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| The modern ninite
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| chisleu wrote:
| Yup, I'm spoiled by Claude 3.7 Sonnet right now. I had to
| stop using opus for plan mode in my Agent because it is just
| so expensive. I'm using Gemini 2.5 pro for that now.
|
| I'm considering ordering one of these today: https://www.newe
| gg.com/p/N82E16816139451?Item=N82E1681613945...
|
| It looks like it will hold 5 GPUs with a single slot open for
| infiniband
|
| Then local models might be lower quality, but it won't be
| slow! :)
| kristopolous wrote:
| The GPUs are the hard things to find unless you want to pay
| like 50% markup
| evo_9 wrote:
| I was using Claude 3.7 exclusively for coding, but it sure
| seems like it got worse suddenly about 2-3 weeks back. It
| went from writing pretty solid code I had to make only
| minor changes to, to being completely off its rails,
| altering files unrelated to my prompt, undoing fixes from
| the same conversation, reinventing db access and ignoring
| existing coding 'standards' established in the existing
| codebase. Became so untrustworthy I finally gave OpenAi O3
| a try and honestly, I was pretty surprised how solid it has
| been. I've been using o3 since, and I find it generally
| does exactly what I ask, esp if you have a well established
| project with plenty of code for it to reference.
|
| Just wondering if Claude 3.7 has seemed differently lately
| for anyone else? Was my go to for several months, and I'm
| no fan of OpenAI, but o3 has been rock solid.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| What are you going to do with the LLMs you run?
| chisleu wrote:
| 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.
| prettyblocks wrote:
| I've been using openwebui and am pretty happy with it. Why do
| you like lm studio more?
| truemotive wrote:
| Open WebUI can leverage the built in web server in LM Studio,
| just FYI in case you thought it was primarily a chat
| interface.
| prophesi wrote:
| Not OP, but with LM Studio I get a chat interface out-of-the-
| box for local models, while with openwebui I'd need to
| configure it to point to an OpenAI API-compatible server
| (like LM Studio). It can also help determine which models
| will work well with your hardware.
|
| LM Studio isn't FOSS though.
|
| I did enjoy hooking up OpenWebUI to Firefox's experimental AI
| Chatbot. (browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false,
| browser.ml.chat.provider to localhost:${openwebui-port})
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| 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
| noman-land wrote:
| I love LM Studio. It's a great tool. I'm waiting for another
| generation of Macbook Pros to do as you did :).
| imranq wrote:
| I'd love to host my own LLMs but I keep getting held back from
| the quality and affordability of Cloud LLMs. Why go local
| unless there's private data involved?
| zackify wrote:
| 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
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| nix0n wrote:
| LM Studio is quite good on Windows with Nvidia RTX also.
| pzo wrote:
| 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.
| chisleu wrote:
| > I'm not bullish on MCP
|
| You gotta help me out. What do you see holding it back?
| minimaxir wrote:
| tl;dr the current hype around it is a solution looking for a
| problem and at a high level, it's just a rebrand of the Tools
| paradigm.
| mhast wrote:
| It's "Tools as a service", so it's really trying to make
| tool calling easier to use.
| ijk wrote:
| 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.
| zackify wrote:
| Ollama doesn't even have a way to customize the context size
| per model and persist it. LM studio does :)
| Anaphylaxis wrote:
| This isn't true. You can `ollama run {model}`, `/set
| parameter num_ctx {ctx}` and then `/save`. Recommended to
| `/save {model}:{ctx}` to persist on model update
| gregorym wrote:
| I use https://ollamac.com/ to run Ollama and it works great. It
| has MCP support also.
| simonw wrote:
| That's clearly your own product (it links to Koroworld in the
| footer and you've posted about that on Hacker News in the
| past).
|
| Are you sharing any of your revenue from that $79 license fee
| with the https://ollama.com/ project that your app builds on
| top of?
| usef- wrote:
| Is this related to the open source ollamac at all?
| https://github.com/kevinhermawan/Ollamac
| visiondude wrote:
| LMStudio works surprisingly well on M3 Ultra 64gb and 27b models.
|
| Nice to have a local option, especially for some prompts.
| squanchingio wrote:
| I'll be nice to have the MCP servers exposed like LMStudio
| OpenAI-like endpoints.
| patates wrote:
| 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.
| robbru wrote:
| I've been using the Google Gemma QAT models in 4B, 12B, and 27B
| with LM Studio with my M1 Max. https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-
| community/gemma-3-12B-it-qat...
| api wrote:
| 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.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| There's a "headless" checkbox in settings->developer
| diggan wrote:
| Still, you need to install and run the AppImage at least once
| to enable the "lms" cli which can later be used. Would be
| nice with a completely GUI-less installation/use method too.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| Oh, that horrible Electron UI. Under Windows it pegs a core on
| my CPU at all times!
|
| If you're just working as a single user via the OpenAI
| protocol, you might want to consider koboldcpp. It bundles a
| GUI launcher, then starts in text-only mode. You can also tell
| it to just run a saved configuration, bypassing the GUI; I've
| successfully run it as a system service on Windows using nssm.
|
| https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp/releases
|
| Though there are a lot of roleplay-centric gimmicks in its
| feature set, its context-shifting feature is singular. It
| caches the intermediate state used by your last query,
| extending it to build the next one. As a result you save on
| generation time with large contexts, and also any conversation
| that has been pushed out of the context window still indirectly
| influences the current exchange.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| claude going mcp over remote kinda normalised the protocol for
| inference routing. now with lmstudio running as local mcp host,
| you can just tunnel it (cloudflared/ngrok), drop a tiny gateway
| script and boom your laptop basically acts like a mcp node in
| hybrid mesh. short prompts hit qwen local, heavier ones go
| claude. with same payload and interface we can actually get
| multihost local inference clusters wired together by mcp
| politelemon wrote:
| 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 playwright, asked it to read the top
| headline from HN and it got stuck on an infinite loop of
| navigating to Hacker News, but doing nothing with the output.
|
| I wanted to try it out with a few other models, but figuring out
| how to download new models isn't obvious either, it turned out to
| be the search icon. Anyway other models didn't fare much better
| either, some outright ignored the tools despite having the
| capacity for 'tool use'.
| maxcomperatore wrote:
| good.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| Closed source - wont touch.
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(page generated 2025-06-25 23:00 UTC)