Ok - I just did some playing. FWIW I’ve not used LMStudio with ClaudeCode - since ClaudeCode especially Opus is leaps ahead when it comes to writing code.
Also LMStudio doesn’t seem to have ready access to the internet and some of what I do with Claude is to help make decisions that I ground with blog posts, etc. For example, upcoming vacations were planned in part with Claude.
That being said, LMStudio is still a good tool. Just to run an experiment, I took a Systems Thinking problem that I setup: Systems Thinking with GenAI: Solve Deep Team Problems and ran it through LMStudio using two different models:
- zai-org/glm-4.7-flash - in Thinking Mode. ~40 seconds. 50 tokens/second - 2124 tokens used. It’s first question was on the money.
- gpt-oss-20b - High Reasoning Mode - 65 tokens/second - otherwise difficult to compare since it is asking more questions. This is the preferred route in Systems Thinking.
I have some hope for Small Language Models, models that are designed for a specific problem set and not general purpose. For example, coding TypeScript and tool usage, not general question answering. However, I have no idea when these will appear.
Simon Wilson recently commented that his next computer would have 128GB of RAM, so I assume that is the target - in 3yrs time for me.