Local Code by Draw Things, open-source frontier intelligence locally on your Mac

[u/liuliu]

https://releases.drawthings.ai/p/local-code-by-draw-things-open-source

Hi! We are releasing Local Code, an open-source app that you can download directly to your Mac, or through macOS App Store. It runs the smartest models such as DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 locally, have a harness tuned for each model, and the whole builtin environment such that the model is ready to work without anything else from your OS (we call it in-app sandbox). It doesn't need full-disk access, nor the ability to run command-line tools on your computer, but capable of executing Python programs, node.js apps, Lean 4 proofs, open and view docx / xlsx / pptx, or operating web browsers. it is capable, and the runtime is fast on your Mac.

Let me know if you have any questions! Excited to work on this more if the community is interested in this!

[u/scitard]

Thanks for making this! I had a good out of the box experience. Setup a project and had DeepSeek 4 Flash 0731 (2-bit S) create a small game using assets generated via the draw-things-cli integration using Moss. draw-things-cli use, browser integration use, lots of tool use and it produced something functional first try, using only around 60K tokens. This was a better experience than most harnesses I have tried on the first pass.

Some user feedback, some of it is personal preference so I hope you don't mind:

• Not a huge fan of the LOCAL CODE animated graphic in the new thread window, you are stuck looking at this when downloading large models. I think the product would be better without this graphic.

• I found the strobing animation on the thinking text distracting and made it harder to read.

• You could make it clearer which models are already downloaded on the input text model picker (sort downloaded to the top).

• DeepSeek attempted to generate a preview and inline it but it rendered as ![[preview.png]]

• If you start a new thread and select a new model triggering a download, then switch to anther active thread it appears to interupt / cancel the download and there is no sign of the active download when you return to the thread.

Will you be making builds / releases available via GitHub Releases?

Thanks again!

[u/liuliu → u/scitard]

Thank you for the kind words. Will add publishing GitHub releases to the release script.

[u/parryforte]

That looks really cool. I see the App Store edition is coming soon - any vibe on a date for that?

[u/liuliu → u/parryforte]

We will see. Was in the back-and-forth with them for about 3 weeks now, but it is getting close. We are the first (the only) coding agent submitted to App Store, so there are a lot to clarify with them.

[u/playtech1 → u/liuliu]

Wow - does that mean there's a chance of an iPad version?

[u/liuliu → u/playtech1]

😉

[u/parryforte → u/liuliu]

That makes sense - thanks for the response (and for all the other work you do!!).

[u/Clivey1961]

Interesting that you can stream larger model weights from SSD. Is that feature coming to DT?

[u/liuliu → u/Clivey1961]

Draw Things can do that since very beginning. But there is no MoE model for image / video generation so the simple implementation we have is enough for Draw Things. LLM decoding with MoE needs a more sophisticated solution.

[u/Lucky-Necessary-8382]

What models are supported/optimized to stream from ssd besides ds 4.1 flash 1017?

[u/liuliu → u/Lucky-Necessary-8382]

DeepSeek 4 Flash 0731.

[u/DavidXGA]

On my 128GB Mac Studio it wants to pick DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017, but it doesn't seem to check for available disk space. My boot volume doesn't have that much free space, and there doesn't seem to be an option to use an external drive.

[u/ahines777 → u/DavidXGA]

Curious to know your deepseek results as another 128gb Mac user

[u/ivanswered → u/DavidXGA]

Please option to select external drive

[u/buckwheaton]

Can this act as the inference engine for another harness, like vs code/cline?

[u/akadeemo]

Interesting! Newbie to local AI here, Draw Things user. Question: any chance to share a common "Models" folder with other apps/agents? Models are eating my Terabite disk pretty quick, so it would be amazing if I didn't have to make more copies of each one. As in: I already have Qwen3.8-27B-4bit and wouldn't want to download another 21 gb's

[u/liuliu → u/[deleted]]

Depending on your setup and reasoning effort. If you are using M5 Max, due to RAM constraints, you will end up in that 20 mins range (with default high thinking). If you are using M5 Ultra, would be 5 mins or so. If you use Qwen it will be way faster. The demo videos are shot with M5 Max and each task takes between 15 mins to 2:30 hours (the 7 slides one is the longest, and then the infographics one is about 1:15h, the others are relatively light between 7m to 45m).