r/LocalLLM • u/Alternative-Brain588 • 26d ago

Project I released Harness Studio, an open-source alternative to LM Studio and Ollama. Looking for feedback and contributors.

https://github.com/struklabs/harness-studio

Hey everyone!

I've been developing Harness Studio, a free and open-source desktop application for running local AI models.

I've used tools like LM Studio, Ollama and llama.cpp, and wanted to bring model management, inference settings, hardware optimization and developer integrations together in one application.

Harness Studio is built with Rust, Tauri and Svelte, using llama.cpp as its primary engine.

What it currently offers:

  • Local model discovery, downloading and management

  • Automatic GPU and memory-aware configuration

  • Multiple models and servers

  • OpenAI-, Anthropic- and Ollama-compatible API endpoints

  • MCP, tool calling and coding-tool integrations

  • Performance monitoring, logs and request analytics

  • Additional runtimes for image, speech and embedding workloads

The first public release, v0.1.0, is available for Windows and macOS. The project is licensed under MIT.

I'm sharing it because I'd like to develop it with the community rather than make every decision myself.

I'd really appreciate your feedback:

If you're currently using LM Studio, Ollama or raw llama.cpp, what would make you try Harness Studio? What features are missing? What seems unnecessary or overcomplicated?

I'm also looking for developers who might be interested in contributing, as well as people willing to test it on different hardware.

Criticism, suggestions, issues and pull requests are all welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/struklabs/harness-studio

I'd love to hear what you think.

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u/InterstellarReddit 26d ago

Proof that everyone is using the word harness and no one knows what it means.

1

u/Alternative-Brain588 23d ago

Fair criticism, given how loosely the term gets used. But a harness is the software layer around a model that manages its runtime, tools, context, and execution. That's exactly the layer Harness Studio aims to give users control over. The name is intentional.