Hob: an open-source, on-device alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT
Translated by a model; the original is in Russian.
Hob, an open-source app for using AI on your own computer, was presented in Hacker News' Show HN section. Its authors pitch it as an alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT that keeps data off the cloud. The project is developed by Frigade, and the code is on GitHub under the MIT license.
What Hob does
The app runs open-weight models, including Gemma and gpt-oss, locally on macOS, Windows and Linux. The developers stress that it is free, private and works offline.
The main focus is ease of use. Hob picks the strongest frontier open-weight model that fits a given machine and handles the whole setup. Users don't have to choose weights or tweak launch parameters themselves. The authors cite filling out PDF forms and working through documents as example uses.
Technical details
The repository's topic tags indicate the app is built on Electron and uses llama.cpp to run models locally, with MCP support also mentioned. At the time of writing, the repository had 195 commits, about 150 stars and four forks.
The announcement drew 95 points and 23 comments on Hacker News. Builds for all three platforms are available on the project's site, hob.chat.
Source: Hacker News
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