Hob: Open-source desktop app runs file-aware AI models fully on your own computer
Christian has released Hob, a free, MIT-licensed desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that lets users work with their files through an AI assistant, similar to Claude and ChatGPT's desktop apps. Unlike those products, the model runs locally using open-weight models such as Gemma 4 and gpt-oss, so chats and files stay on the user's device. The app auto-selects a suitable model for the user's hardware, offers sandboxed code execution, built-in web search that can be disabled, MCP connector support, image recognition and offline operation. The developer built it because existing local AI apps could not reliably read, edit, or analyze files the way cloud apps do, and noted that small models needed extra safeguards to use tools dependably. He argues that systems with 16 GB or more of RAM perform well for most everyday tasks.
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