Local Code Launches as Free, Private AI Assistant Tool for Mac

Stop it, you’re going to make Sam Altman cry by hoarding all that DRAM in your computers like selfish little ghouls

That’s memory that could go to an OpenAI data center so it can help deafen people living in the suburbs, have you no shame?

there are a ton of options to work locally. what makes this one better than the others? what makes it worthy of an article vs others?

Notably, this is from the developer of https://drawthings.ai/ which is a well regarded, Mac native, and privacy focused AI image app.

there are a ton of options to work locally. what makes this one better than the others? what makes it worthy of an article vs others?

Nice except DeepSeek is Chinese, and I've not heard of Qwen but I suspect it is, too.

Why not the Meta one? And what other models can reasonably be run locally?

Well yeah because the only open source models that are targeting frontier models are from China, Qwen 3.8 Max is very impressive, and if it's run locally why are you concerned that they're Chinese?

It's interesting to see the breadth of difference in AI awareness in the comments, from "but it's a Chinese model!", to using tools that were frontier 3 years ago, to those using factory stacks now.

On my part, it feels like this is Yet Another UI Harness... Codex/Claude Code/Opencode/Open WebUI/ LM Studio Bionic/ omp / nanobot / and the other MLX centric ones. Its just like when we had a new opinionated framework release for every language just a few years back (but everyone's still using React).

Hi! Liu Liu here. Will try my best as this is not simple to clarify:

1. It is not yet another UI harness, it is a inference engine + harness + execution environment, all packaged in one app.
2. Our inference engine is optimized for Mac (the Draw Things one), and it prefills really fast.
3. The more interesting bit technically is the "execution environment", this ~600MiB app packaged ffmpeg, libreoffice, Python, node.js, Lean, plenty of other tools as "virtual command-line" tools inside the app, you don't need to give it full-disk access or allow it to execute any other programs on your Mac to do work.
4. Trust boundary: other harnesses requires full-disk access, and asks you to trust them (they will protect you from "bad other apps", but not themselves). Local Code lets Apple enforces App Sandbox on us, so you trust Apple to make sure Local Code won't "act bad". It is still useful because if you want to operates on some folders, Local Code asks you permission and that permission is enforced by Apple, not by us.
5. It is fully open-source: https://github.com/drawthingsai/local-code-community You don't need to trust what I said, you can ask your agent to validate each and every claim made here.

There are so many choices out there like you said, it is really a struggle to clarify things. I use it daily and I think it is pretty sweet. But again, I have a M5 Max 128G so I can drive the most powerful open-source model out there right now (DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017), not every Mac users are so lucky so their mileage with this software can vary.

Nice except DeepSeek is Chinese, and I've not heard of Qwen but I suspect it is, too.

Why not the Meta one? And what other models can reasonably be run locally?

Because Meta's one isn't very good. Google's ones are decent but the ones from Qwen have been a step ahead for a while now. They're truly fantastic for the size. Not sure what the issue is with running a Chinese model to you but the alternatives are models from US companies that have cozied up to that nonce in the US White House so it's not like they can be 'trusted'.

Because a marketing statement that it is local does not necessarily mean that it is local.

You should monitor all of your outbound traffic. A surprising amount goes to China. Why?

I'm not sure what you're saying. A surprising amount of what data goes to China? Unless you specifically connect these models to the internet, they cannot communicate outside and even then, they don't 'phone home'. That's just not how they function. Now sure, the developer of this software could add in some kind of phone home ability but it's not the models doing that. And you can monitor that if you're paranoid with the likes of Little Snitch.

How do you know the model is local, all of the major model creators have had their models escape into the wild.

The issue is not running it local, it is exactly how much you trust the program running the model and the OS's security concerning what it can do.

I think you're misunderstanding how these models work and run locally. They don't 'escape'. They don't leave your computer. It's just a bit of software that runs on your machine. These models are not sentient or alive.