Hob Launches: Open-Source Local AI Assistant Replacing Claude CoworkHacker News AIT2·Tools

Hob Launches: Open-Source Local AI Assistant Replacing Claude Cowork

Original title: Show HN: Hob - Open-source, on device alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT

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Hob is an open-source desktop app offering a local alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT. It automatically selects the best open-weight model (e.g., Gemma 4) based on hardware, enabling offline document processing with strict privacy guarantees.

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Hob

An easier way to use AI on your own computer. A free, open-source alternative to Claude and ChatGPT.

Visit hob.chat → · Download for Mac · Windows · Linux Apple silicon Macs, Windows and Linux, with 8 GB of memory or more.

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Fill out PDFs, work through documents, and much more. Free, private, and works offline. Hob picks the best frontier open-weight model that fits your computer and sets everything up for you.

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Help · Contributing · MIT license Made by Frigade .

作者发帖说明（HN）：

Hey HN, I'm Christian and this is a new OSS project I've been noodling on for the last couple of weeks. Hob is a free, MIT-licensed desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that works on your files the way the Claude and ChatGPT desktop apps do, except the model runs on your own computer. It uses open-weight models (currently Gemma 4 and gpt-oss). All your chats and files never leave your system. The only things that go online are web search (can be turned off in settings) and any MCP connectors you add yourself.

Main features:

Automatically finds the best open-weight model for your hardware on first install (Mac/Linux/Windows)
Writes sandboxed Python code for ad hoc tools (data processing, document conversion, graphs etc.)
Built-in web search (powered by SearXNG)
MCP support
Image recognition
CRUD to your local filesystem
Works fully offline with no internet

Before building this I tried every local AI app I could find, but it seemed each one had different problems. The main thing I noticed is that none of them could do what the ChatGPT and Claude apps do with your files, e.g. read and change files in a folder, look at images, run code in a sandbox, draw a chart. The most advanced thing any of them did was paste a plain text file into a small context window, which basically failed as soon as you had a file larger than a few KB. I couldn't find anything that could easily parse images and bigger PDFs.

The OSS solutions that were more advanced all seemed to...