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?

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.

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.

This is - IF it’s as advertised and if it works well (I recognize those are two big ifs) - fantastic.

I’m very interested in reading others thoughts on this, but it seems like a huge win.

I’m extremely uncomfortable with aspects of the LLMs. The more alternatives the better, particularly if it keeps my data private and doesn’t require a subscription. This is also potentially absolutely something Apple should love, as it further supports their approach to running as much AI on device as possible, which in turn will require the hardware capable of doing so, and which will ultimately translate into more sales for the mothership.