Alternatives
Products that do what JS Local-only AI Apps starter kit: cost $0 to run and test locally does
Hi HN! Here's a local-only stack I built over the weekend - hope it can be useful for you! I have been building a lot of AI apps - https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town https://github.com/a16z-infra/companion-app ... And there were definitely times I spent way too much $$ before deploying the app to production. So I was looking for a "local only" stack and found a few tools that worked well together. I used the following set of tools but may add more options later: - Inference: Ollama - VectorDB: Supabase pg-vector - LLM orchestration: langchain -…
- 1
- 2
- 3IM
Hi Hackers, Excited to share a macOS app I've been working on: https://recurse.chat/ for chatting with local AI. While it's amazing that you can run AI models locally quite easily these days (through llama.cpp / llamafile / ollama / llm CLI etc.), I missed feature complete chat interfaces. Tools like LMStudio are super powerful, but there's a learning curve to it. I'd like to hit a middleground of simplicity and customizability for advanced users. Here's what separates RecurseChat out from similar apps: - UX designed for you to use local AI as a daily driver.…
2024 · recurse.chat
- 4AT
Hi HN community! We want to share AI-town, a deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI simulation - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize. Inspired by great work from the Stanford Generative Agent paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442). A few features: - Includes a convex.dev backed server-side game engine that handles global state - Multiplayer ready. Deployment ready - 100% Typescript - Easily customizable. You can fork it, change character memories, add new sprites/tiles and you have a custom AI simulation…
2023 · github.com
- 5
- 6LA
I built LocalGPT over 4 nights as a Rust reimagining of the OpenClaw assistant pattern (markdown-based persistent memory, autonomous heartbeat tasks, skills system). It compiles to a single ~27MB binary — no Node.js, Docker, or Python required. Key features: - Persistent memory via markdown files (MEMORY, HEARTBEAT, SOUL markdown files) — compatible with OpenClaw's format - Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) + semantic search (local embeddings, no API key needed) - Autonomous heartbeat runner that checks tasks on a configurable interval - CLI + web interface + desktop GUI - Multi-provider:…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 7WW
I spent a few hours last weekend testing whether AI can replace code by executing directly. Built a contact manager where every HTTP request goes to an LLM with three tools: database (SQLite), webResponse (HTML/JSON/JS), and updateMemory (feedback). No routes, no controllers, no business logic. The AI designs schemas on first request, generates UIs from paths alone, and evolves based on natural language feedback. It works—forms submit, data persists, APIs return JSON—but it's catastrophically slow (30-60s per request), absurdly expensive ($0.05/request), and has zero UI…
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 8IP
The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol. Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day. A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship…
Mar 2026 · georgelarson.me
- 9
- 10CO
Hey HN, Henry and Roman here - we've been building a cross-platform framework for deploying LLMs, VLMs, Embedding Models and TTS models locally on smartphones. Ollama enables deploying LLMs models locally on laptops and edge severs, Cactus enables deploying on phones. Deploying directly on phones facilitates building AI apps and agents capable of phone use without breaking privacy, supports real-time inference with no latency, we have seen personalised RAG pipelines for users and more. Apple and Google actively went into local AI models recently with the launch of Apple Foundation Frameworks…
2025 · github.com
- 11
- 12OS
Hi everyone, we’re a small team, supported by Mozilla, who are working on re-imagining a UI for training, tuning and testing local LLMs. Everything is open source. If you’ve been training your own LLMs or have always wanted to, we’d love for you to play with the tool and give feedback on what the future development experience for LLM engineering could look like.
2025 · github.com
- 13FC
Just to clarify the background a bit. This project wasn’t planned as a big standalone release at first. On January 16, Ollama added support for an Anthropic-compatible API, and I was curious how far this could be pushed in practice. I decided to try plugging local Ollama models directly into a Claude Code-style workflow and see if it would actually work end to end. Here is the release note from Ollama that made this possible: https://ollama.com/blog/claude Technically, what I do is pretty straightforward: - Detect which local models are available in Ollama. - When…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 14IM
I built this out of frustration as I lead the development of AI features at Yola.com. Prompt testing should be simple and straightforward. All I wanted was a simple way to test prompts with variables and jinja2 templates across different models, ideally somthing I could open during a call, run few tests, and share results with my team. But every tool I tried hit me with a clunky UI, required login and API keys, or forced a lengthy setup process. And that's not all. Then came the pricing. The last quote I got for one of the tools on the market was $6,000/year for a team of 16 people in a…
2025 · langfa.st
- 15SA
Hey HN! I've been serially building AI projects for over a year, and building node + js SaaS products for over 10 years with my partner. We decided to combine everything we know about AI with our node best-practices into a code boilerplate and see if it can help anyone else! We've had a bunch of positive feedback already from early-users, and at least two SaaS products being developed right now with StartKit.AI as their base. Here's what you get! → Pre-built modules for all common AI tasks: - Chat! Everything to build a ChatGPT clone or your own chatbot. With best-practice implementations of…
2024 · startkit.ai
- 16CI
One of the most frequent questions one faces while running LLMs locally is: I have xx RAM and yy GPU, Can I run zz LLM model ? I have vibe coded a simple application to help you with just that. Update: A lot of great feedback for me to improve the app. Thank you all.
2025 · can-i-run-this-llm-blue.vercel.app
- 17CN
2024 · github.com
- 18DL
Hi HN! I left Google earlier this year and created Dyad, a local, open-source AI app builder made with Electron. The motivation: I tried one of the popular cloud-based AI app builders, but when I pulled down the app to run locally and debug in Cursor, it just didn’t work. So I created Dyad, an app builder that runs fully on your computer, making it easy to switch between Dyad and coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code. Source code: https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/ Download (free, no sign-up): https://www.dyad.sh/ I've gotten questions about how it…
Sep 2025 · dyad.sh
- 19LR
I built localLLLM: a small community project for running local models. Live: https://locallllm.fly.dev The goal is simple: if someone has model + OS + GPU + RAM, they should get steps that actually work (ideally one liner) I need help populating and validating guides. If you run local models, please submit one working recipe (or report what failed). Would love to hear general feedback as well!
Apr 2026 · locallllm.fly.dev
- 20SH
2024 · github.com
- 21
- 22BA
I built CodinIT because I wanted that "Bolt-like" experience, but on my own terms. 100% Open Source The core idea: You should be able to prompt a full-stack application into existence, but the environment should be local, the models should be swappable (Ollama/LM Studio support was a priority), and the output should be standard code you actually own. A few things I focused on: Context Management: One of the hardest parts was figuring out how to feed the right file context back to the LLM without blowing out the token limit. I’ve implemented a custom indexing approach to keep the "vibe…
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 23IB
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 24HA
Demo starts at 50m into the video. This was a bit terrifying to record because 2am the previous night everything was totally broken after a major refactor (so that we could add external LLM support as well as local GPUs). But pressure can be a useful force :-D We start with a stack deployed on my laptop without a GPU, pointing to together.ai so we can run open source LLMs easily without having to have access to a GPU. We show simple inference through the ChatGPT-like web interface (with users, sessions etc) and then simple drag'n'drop RAG. Then we show some helix apps defined as yaml: Marvin…
2024 · youtube.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →