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.
Yeah… 😅 I originally named it Loki because, well…if you leave LLMs unsupervised they just create mischief. Any ideas of a good rename? I’ve gotten this comment before and I just couldn’t think of anything good.
Weapons like Gungnir are popular names, Lævateinn is a little hard to spell though.
Maybe Coyote? Coyote is the trickster spirit in a lot of Native American mythologies.
Do you have a GitHub and would you be willing to share with me so I could credit you with the name? No worries if not, I can just link to your Lemmy profile instead of you prefer. I just don’t want to change it without giving credit.
Ooh I like Coyote! That’s definitely in the running now. Not to mention that’s really a really cool allusion to Native American mythology!
Or Coyode (mixture between code and coyote, could be written co[yo]de for extra yo). Only has 4 duckduckgo results so easily searchable and distinguishable.
ChatGPT generated logo example
After sitting with Coyote for a while, I’m really liking the name. Before I get too attached, any other ideas? (Just to make sure I stay objective 😛)
Stop overthinking it and use it. It seems like the consensus is in the approval of your choice.
Works for me. I’ll refactor that and rename it tomorrow and hopefully have a new minor release sometime this week. It’ll be another baking change release so I’ll need to attach a couple commands to the release notes to make it easy to migrate.
Not to mention road-runners (humans) and ACME (OpenAi, Anthropic etc.) extending the metaphor in a different direction… Wile.E. (coyote, suupergenius) might be another name option.
Ahh, ninja’d, I’ll leave it as another vote.
Hermes is also the trickster god in Greek mythology, but not sure if the makers of that project were thinking of that, or his role as messenger. Or the one who guides souls to Hades. Dude’s got a lot of jobs…
I feel like that well describes a border collie.
Wants to do stuff, but if you don’t attend they’ll find stuff to do.
Could call it Sylvie as well (the Marvel gender bent Loki)
Sounds like some shepherd reference could be good, since it’s herding the agents.