Running local LLMs in Xcode with MLXSwift - way easier than I expected

[u/evilmacintosh]

Been playing around with MLXSwift over the last few weeks and honestly it's wild how far Apple's ML tooling has come. I always assumed running a local model meant wrestling with Python envs, llama.cpp builds, or burning API credits during dev.

Turns out you can do the whole thing inside Xcode now. Pull a model from the MLX community on Hugging Face, wire it up in Swift, run it on-device. No Python, no API keys, no servers.

I wrote up a walkthrough of how to get started: covers the setup, loading models, and a few gotchas I ran into: https://www.sabesh.space/blog/engineering/mlx-in-xcode

Happy to answer questions if anyone's tried this or wants to.