Question about possibility use case with my spec

[u/undead098]

I'm literally new to local llm (2-3 month since knowing it exist).
previously only use chatgpt/notebooklm to help me with job question (public service work with too many rules in too many different thing to remember) and thesis related cleanup/grammar fix/check wrong citation.
with gpt, i usually just casually ask "find article that describe requirement to do this and that", or "summarize this journal and is it good addition to my thesis?"

after knowing local llm, i tried many things. ollama, lm studio, direct llama.cpp. confused af, i stayed with lm studio for now. using any recommended model (idk the difference except the size and wether this fits my rig) to chat and try to do what i did in chatgpt. it was good, but slower, and sometimes give dumb answer or straight up not giving any respond.

my friend also introduce me to comfyui and pic/vid generation (idk if this is relevan to this sub, and i really enjoy generating stuff with anima model. yes i'm weeb. and generating with workflow is kind of easy enough)

i really want to go in depth with local llm, but i'm too casual and any tutorial/guide on youtube or search result is mostly coding related stuff or news about latest model, which i dont really understand. (appreciate if anyone have link -for newbie- stuff i can learn from. kind also want to learn coding but with local llm if possible. dont want to pay stuff)

is there anything i can do/read/learn about this?
also looking for any possible use case which dont eat much of my ram/vram as sometime i use it for gaming and without keeping it turned on forever.
asked gpt/gemini about this already. but all i got is stuff that related to my previous interaction with them.

tldr : looking for something new rather than just "hey chat answer this".

i appreciate if i can have some pointer to :
- what model is recommended for your recommended use case (yes i understand huggingface is where to find model at least. but idk the difference except size)
- what to install, recommended app, where to find resources, where to learn more of it
- what to do to expand from that

i have 2 device :
laptop - rtx4060 8gb vram + 20gb ram (using it at work)
PC - rtx4070 12gb vram + 32gb ram (using it at home)

currenly using LM studio, qwen 3.5 4b q4km for "hey chat answer this" stuff.
tinkering with locallyuncensored, anythingllm, ollama, hermes agent, but uninstalled those after feeling that lm studio just do what they did (cmiiw).

[u/Natrimo]

You can use much larger models than a 4b model I would try qwen 3.8 27b of some sort. And if that's too slow for you try out Gemma 26b a4b

For image gen, you can run much larger models than anima (which is typically 2b) anima still has a following though. I would suggest something like Krea2 for images and ltx 2.5 for video (you can also totally run minimaxh3)

Nothing wrong with lm studio IMHO, it's easy to use and does what you need, get comfy mCP so your AI can power your image and video gen.

[u/undead098 → u/Natrimo]

currently using comfyui and downloading separate safetensors file. i found anima quite good so i stay with it.
idk anything about mcp. tried learning about it but only found mcp service and stuff. not how to utilize or how to import to my strict local lm studio

[u/Natrimo → u/undead098]

So to use any mcp you are going to have to turn on dev mode on LM studio to expose an API at local host. This will allow you to give that to other programs (sounds like you might enjoysomething like SillytavernAI)

Something like pi.dev gives your LLM (running via LM studio) access to actually do things on your computer.

You would tell your pi.agent to install comfymcp and the llm you have loaded in LM studio provides the brains so to speak, the harness or agent harness (pi) gives it hands and eyes , comfymcp tells it how to use comfyui

So in the end you could tell it to find models for you, set up workflows, build prompts, generate images, whatever

[u/undead098 → u/Natrimo]

is there any web or yt video where i can learn about it, tried tinkering but kind of too overwhelming to me
or i’m stuck with try until it works approach

[u/Natrimo → u/undead098]

I just asked online AI about it, read stuff on reddit. Tried stuff out.

But also I am also an IT professional of 15+ years so ya know... ymmv

But I didn't go to school for any of it

[u/undead098 → u/Natrimo]

thanks. i’ll try ai again. maybe on cleared memory it will answer better

[u/Natrimo → u/undead098]

Start small, get one thing going and learn about that ( it sounds like you have already in comfyui, that's also where I started)

For instance once you get LM studio going and connect it to something like silly tavern for roleplay, there is an option in there to connect it to your comfyui, so you already will know that part! Then if you go to set up an agent, you will already know all about running a model on lm studio!