LM Studio Bionic: the AI agent for open models

Hey everyone! Yagil the founder of LM Studio here. If you want to take Bionic for a spin with GLM 5.2 / Kimi K2.6 / Kimi Coder K2.7, email your lmstudio.ai username to [email protected] and I'll load your account with some credits!

Try it out for coding (in a "Code" project) and document creation / manipulation (in a "Work" project). In Work projects we have automatic checkpointing for every change the agent makes. Would love to hear your feedback.

I have never previously tried a agentic harness for local models yet, but I really love LM Studio so I gave Bionic a shot immediately after reading this!

First impression: it works great. I use Codex as my main agent, and the UI looks similar enough that it's familiar and simple to get started. I just pointed it to my existing LM Studio models library, ran Qwen3.6 35B, and the results are exactly what I would hope for.

I did notice some rough edges that might be worth improving, however:

- Current working directory is not the clearest on the main page of the app. It shows the project name, but is missing the prominent working directory label like Codex has. - The model seems to load when you hit Enter, but it shows "Working" instead of of "Loading model". - There doesn't seem to be a way to pre load the model, it seems like you have to send it something to load the model. - I don't see a way to easily unload the model like the eject button in LM Studio without quitting the app - I pointed it to a directory called "GitHub & Projects" and it somehow ended up making a new folder called "GitHub & Projects". Yes, I know the name is weird but it shouldn't have done that.

This kind of thing just makes me think Apple will get to a point where they have good enough local models and good enough harnesses for doing things, and most normal people will just use them… Does the LLM become another interface to computing?

Why would I use this over any other harness? I suppose they're wrapping it all up in a nice package for enterprise, especially ones that want to control their LLM usage for cost and data security compared to the cloud frontier models.

It was fun to try out which local models made better agents. Few thoughts.

* locked to a single dir, so no system wide access.

* no local web search, can be fixed ddg or local mcp.

* no ssh, I want to have it ssh into my server and do the work.

* doesnt show the model being loaded, needs a bar/% counter.

* Can you drag/drop documents in the work dirs, or only + add them?

I love lm-studio, so cant wait to see how this goes. For local I normally use opencode + lmstudio.

I’m worried about the switch in business model here, which is part of the reason I just switched to LM Studio from Ollama.

> use the largest frontier open source models through LM Studio Secure Cloud

It says this is a separate app than regular LM Studio but I'm not seeing a way to download it.

Am I blind?

A friendly reminder that both LM Studio app and now this new LM Studio Bionic app are closed source.

Since most people are unaware of this fact.

Great to see LM Studio expanding into agent workflows. Local model tooling keeps getting better, and having an open-source option for this is valuable for developers who want to keep their data private.

Is this open source or not ?

Very exciting, I'll be trying this out soon.

I wish LM Studio played better with AMD hardware. It would be really great to have an off-the-shelf solution that "just works" on Radeon.

What the hell, as far as i see this is not open source but has the tag line "Meet LM Studio Bionic, the AI agent made for open models" How can someone justify this complete clash of values, who is even an audience for something this. cursed, the agent and harness layer being open is probably more important than your models as you can just switch models every week and they are commodity.

I am not sure I get this. It seems on first glance like just another harness ...

Maybe I missed it, but can we use this with other cloud api’s? Like using Deepseek directly from their platform via their OpenAI endpoints?

Does this support ACP?

It says no data retention or training on your data, but I assume that doesn't hold true for the frontier cloud models you connect to?

https://swival.dev is an AI agent that was designed for open models since day 1.

trusting them to not retain your data and never train on it is for fools. this is something they say to gain adoption and that they will reverse with an obscure 'privacy policy update' down the road.

another cool project that i will never use because frontier models are just too far ahead

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