For the longest time, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to “survive” in this new AI age without having to fork over a ton of money just to keep up. I’ve tried using local models via Ollama, and while they definitely work to a degree, they’re (unsurprisingly) not as good as the big model providers.
The local models tend to
- Forget what they’re doing
- Struggle to break larger tasks into smaller ones
- Lose focus easily
- Have weaker coding performance
- Drift over longer sessions
So to improve the reliability of fully local, smaller models (and to keep all my data local and in my own network), I created Loki.
It’s a local-first, batteries-included command line tool and runtime for building and running LLM workflows locally. It’s model agnostic and supports things like
- Agents and agent delegation
- Roles/personas
- MCP Servers
- RAG
- Custom tools
- Macros
- Workflow Scripting
A lot of the features it supports are specifically designed to compensate for weaknesses in smaller local models. For example:
- Auto continuation to keep pushing models to completion instead of stopping halfway through problems
- Parallel agent delegation so tasks can be split into smaller, focused scopes
- Workflow-based execution (“If this, do that”) for building more reliable and repeatable automations
It also supports the major cloud providers if you want them (which definitely helped while testing 😄), but my long-term goal is simple:
Get as close as possible to Claude Code-style reliability using fully local models.
I’m always open to feedback, questions, or ideas.
So actually, this was the original purpose of it. But all the help I tried to get on it didn’t really have much interest in doing anything outside of the usual big model providers, so I tried advertising a more general use case to attract more input. I can’t deny that agnostic support for even the big providers is helpful when you’re trying to stay current with the rapid advances in LLMs.
After that, I kind of gave up on getting feedback on local-first models. So, instead, I just dove in head-first the way I wanted;Trying new things, building new agents to try and rival Claude Code, adding features as I found them useful and necessary to improve that reliability, etc., and iterating. Then, with the most recent release on Friday, I had done so many changes and improvements specifically for local models that I thought I finally had a strong enough tool to maybe pique enough people’s interest to get some feedback and input. 🙂
Oh, and the config example shows how to add Ollama models here
Ollama is enshittifying at a rate of knots, have you got a way to use llama-server (or preferably llama-swap) instead ?
Looking at Llama-swap, since it says it supports OpenAI-compatible API, it should just work natively already. Just set up the client to be
type: openai-compatibleand fill in the URL and provide the models. Should work out of the box!Hope so, bet it doesn’t without some tweaking though, OpenAI-compatible seldom is, and ollama is bad for that. Still, worth checking out, I’ll have a go at it sometime soonish and perhaps you’ll see a PR (or some doco in the best case scenario).
Looking forward to it! Heads up in case you missed it: I had settled on renaming it to Coyote, so sometime this week will be a breaking change and release to get that done.
Biggest pains are just going to be updating the repo tokens for Crates.io and renaming the homebrew repo.
K, I’ll circle back in a week or so…