clarkjgill/loclm

LocLM is a Windows desktop app that lets you run open source AI language models on your own computer without needing to touch a terminal, install Python, or go hunting for model files yourself. You download an installer, click through it, and start chatting with a model in a few steps. On first launch, the app looks at your computer's CPU, memory, and graphics card, and shows a plain language gauge of what size model your hardware can comfortably run. It offers a curated list of models pulled from Hugging Face, covering families like SmolLM, Llama, Phi, Qwen, and Mistral, and lets you download the one it recommends with a single click, or pick a different one from the library. Downloads show progress, can be paused and resumed, and are checked against a cryptographic hash to confirm they were not corrupted. Once a model is downloaded, everything runs fully offline, since the app bundles its own fonts and only reaches the internet again when downloading additional models. Under the hood, the app is built with Tauri, which pairs a Rust backend with a web based interface, and its frontend is written in React, TypeScript, and Tailwind. The actual chat responses come from llama.cpp, a widely used tool for running these models efficiently, which LocLM bundles and runs quietly in the background as a local web server that the interface talks to over your own machine. While a model is running, a status strip shows live memory, CPU, and graphics memory usage, and the app gives clear messages if a model fails to load. Returning users can resume the last model they used and reopen past conversations. Advanced settings let you adjust things like context length, temperature, GPU layers, and thread count. Because the installer is not yet digitally signed, Windows may show a warning the first time you run it, which the project says is only about how the file is distributed rather than anything the app itself does. It collects no telemetry and keeps all conversations and downloaded models in a folder on your own machine. The application's own code is released under the MIT license, though the bundled llama.cpp software and any models you download carry their own separate licenses.