@houtini/lm Houtini LM - Save Tokens by Offloading Tasks from Claude Code to Your Local LLM Server (LM Studio / Ollama) or a Cloud API

Quick Navigation

How it works | Token savings | Quick start | What gets offloaded | Tools | Model routing | Configuration | Compatible endpoints

I built this because I kept leaving Claude Code running overnight on big refactors and the token bill was painful. A huge chunk of that spend goes on bounded tasks any decent model handles fine - generating boilerplate, code review, commit messages, format conversion. Stuff that doesn't need Claude's reasoning or tool access.

Houtini LM connects Claude Code to a local LLM on your network - or any OpenAI-compatible API. Claude keeps doing the hard work - architecture, planning, multi-file changes - and offloads the grunt work to whatever cheaper model you've got running. Free. No rate limits. Private.

I wrote a full walkthrough of why I built this and how I use it day to day.

How it works

Claude Code (orchestrator)
   |
   |-- Complex reasoning, planning, architecture --> Claude API (your tokens)
   |
   +-- Bounded grunt work --> houtini-lm --HTTP/SSE--> Your local LLM (free)
       . Boilerplate & test stubs          Qwen, Llama, Nemotron, GLM...
       . Code review & explanations        LM Studio, Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp
       . Commit messages & docs            DeepSeek, Groq, Cerebras (cloud)
       . Format conversion
       . Mock data & type definitions
       . Embeddings for RAG pipelines

Claude's the architect. Your local model's the drafter. Claude QAs everything.

Token savings — benchmarked

We built a benchmark using real source files (581–2022 lines of TypeScript) across realistic delegation patterns. The savings come from context avoidance — when Claude delegates, it never reads the source file into its context window.

93.3% net token savings across the session. Without delegation, Claude reads 14,000 tokens of source code then generates a 500-token review. With delegation, Claude sends a ~250 token tool call and reads back a ~500 token summary. The source file never enters Claude's context.

Small tasks (quick answers, commit messages) don't save tokens — the ~250 token MCP overhead dominates. But for anything involving reading and analysing files, which is the majority of real coding sessions, delegation pays for itself immediately.

Run the benchmark against your own setup: LM_STUDIO_URL=http://your-server:1234 node benchmark.mjs

Every response comes back with performance stats - TTFT, tokens per second, generation time - so you can actually see what your local hardware is doing. The session footer tracks cumulative offloaded tokens across every call. Every response also includes quality signals - truncation detection, think-block stripping flags, token estimation accuracy - so Claude can make informed trust decisions about the output.

Quick start

Claude Code

claude mcp add houtini-lm -- npx -y @houtini/lm

That's it. If LM Studio's running on localhost:1234 (the default), Claude can start delegating straight away.

LLM on a different machine

I've got a GPU box on my local network running Qwen 3 Coder Next in LM Studio. If you've got a similar setup, point the URL at it:

claude mcp add houtini-lm -e LM_STUDIO_URL=http://192.168.1.50:1234 -- npx -y @houtini/lm

Cloud APIs

Works with anything speaking the OpenAI format. DeepSeek at twenty-eight cents per million tokens, Groq for speed, Cerebras if you want three thousand tokens per second - whatever you fancy:

claude mcp add houtini-lm \
  -e LM_STUDIO_URL=https://api.deepseek.com \
  -e LM_STUDIO_PASSWORD=your-key-here \
  -- npx -y @houtini/lm

Claude Desktop

Drop this into your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "houtini-lm": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@houtini/lm"],
      "env": {
        "LM_STUDIO_URL": "http://localhost:1234"
      }
    }
  }
}

Model discovery

This is where things get interesting. At startup, houtini-lm queries your LLM server for every model available - loaded and downloaded - then looks each one up on HuggingFace's free API to pull metadata: architecture, licence, download count, pipeline type. All of that gets cached in a local SQLite database (~/.houtini-lm/model-cache.db) so subsequent startups are instant.

The result is that houtini-lm actually knows what your models are good at. Not just the name - the capabilities, the strengths, what tasks to send where. If you've got Nemotron loaded but a Qwen Coder sitting idle, it'll flag that. If someone on a completely different setup loads a Mistral model houtini-lm has never seen before, the HuggingFace lookup auto-generates a profile for it.

Run list_models and you get the full picture:

Loaded models (ready to use):

  nvidia/nemotron-3-nano
    type: llm, arch: nemotron_h_moe, quant: Q4_K_M, format: gguf
    context: 200,082 (max 1,048,576), by: nvidia
    Capabilities: tool_use
    NVIDIA Nemotron: compact reasoning model optimised for step-by-step logic
    Best for: analysis tasks, code bug-finding, math/science questions
    HuggingFace: text-generation, 1.7M downloads, MIT licence

Available models (downloaded, not loaded):

  qwen3-coder-30b-a3b-instruct
    type: llm, arch: qwen3moe, quant: BF16, context: 262,144
    Qwen3 Coder: code-specialised model with agentic capabilities
    Best for: code generation, code review, test stubs, refactoring
    HuggingFace: text-generation, 12.9K downloads, Apache-2.0

For models we know well - Qwen, Nemotron, Granite, LLaMA, GLM, GPT-OSS - there's a curated profile built in with specific strengths and weaknesses. For everything else, the HuggingFace lookup fills the gaps. Cache refreshes every 7 days. Zero friction - sql.js is pure WASM, no native dependencies, no build tools needed.

What gets offloaded

Delegate to the local model - bounded, well-defined tasks:

Keep on Claude - anything that needs reasoning, tool access, or multi-step orchestration:

• Architectural decisions
• Reading/writing files
• Running tests and interpreting results
• Multi-file refactoring plans
• Anything that needs to call other tools

The tool descriptions are written to nudge Claude into planning delegation at the start of large tasks, not just using it when it happens to think of it.

Performance tracking

Every response includes a footer with real performance data - computed from the SSE stream, not from any proprietary API:

Model: zai-org/glm-4.7-flash | 125->430 tokens | TTFT: 678ms, 48.7 tok/s, 12.5s
Session: 8,450 tokens offloaded across 14 calls

The discover tool shows per-model averages across the session:

Performance (this session):
  nvidia/nemotron-3-nano: 6 calls, avg TTFT 234ms, avg 45.2 tok/s
  zai-org/glm-4.7-flash: 8 calls, avg TTFT 678ms, avg 48.7 tok/s

In practice, Claude delegates more aggressively the longer a session runs. After about 5,000 offloaded tokens, it starts hunting for more work to push over. Reinforcing loop.

Model routing

If you've got multiple models loaded (or downloaded), houtini-lm picks the best one for each task automatically. Each model family has per-family prompt hints - temperature, output constraints, and think-block flags - so GLM gets told "no preamble, no step-by-step reasoning" while Qwen Coder gets a low temperature for focused code output.

The routing scores loaded models against the task type (code, chat, analysis, embedding). If the best loaded model isn't ideal for the task, you'll see a suggestion in the response footer pointing to a better downloaded model. No runtime model swapping - model loading takes minutes, so houtini-lm suggests rather than blocks.

Supported model families with curated prompt hints: GLM-4, Qwen3 Coder, Qwen3, LLaMA 3, Nemotron, Granite, GPT-OSS, Nomic Embed. Unknown models get sensible defaults.

Tools

chat

The workhorse. Send a task, get an answer. The description includes planning triggers that nudge Claude to identify offloadable work when it's starting a big task.

custom_prompt

Three-part prompt: system, context, instruction. Keeping them separate prevents context bleed - consistently outperforms stuffing everything into one message, especially with local models. I tested this properly one weekend - took the same batch of review tasks and ran them both ways. Splitting things into three parts won every round.

code_task

Built for code analysis. Pre-configured system prompt with temperature and output constraints tuned per model family via the routing layer.

embed

Generate text embeddings via the OpenAI-compatible /v1/embeddings endpoint. Requires an embedding model to be available - Nomic Embed is a solid choice. Returns the vector, dimension count, and usage stats.

discover

Health check. Returns model name, context window, latency, capability profile, and cumulative session stats including per-model performance averages. Call before delegating if you're not sure the LLM's available.

list_models

Lists everything on the LLM server - loaded and downloaded - with full metadata: architecture, quantisation, context window, capabilities, and HuggingFace enrichment data. Shows capability profiles describing what each model is best at, so Claude can make informed delegation decisions.

Structured JSON output

Both chat and custom_prompt accept a json_schema parameter that forces the response to conform to a JSON Schema. LM Studio uses grammar-based sampling to guarantee valid output - no hoping the model remembers to close its brackets.

{
  "json_schema": {
    "name": "code_review",
    "schema": {
      "type": "object",
      "properties": {
        "issues": {
          "type": "array",
          "items": {
            "type": "object",
            "properties": {
              "line": { "type": "number" },
              "severity": { "type": "string" },
              "description": { "type": "string" }
            },
            "required": ["line", "severity", "description"]
          }
        }
      },
      "required": ["issues"]
    }
  }
}

Getting good results from local models

Qwen, Llama, Nemotron, GLM - they score brilliantly on coding benchmarks now. The gap between a good and bad result is almost always prompt quality, not model capability. I've spent a fair bit of time on this.

Send complete code. Local models hallucinate details when you give them truncated input. If a file's too large, send the relevant function - not a snippet with ... in the middle.

Be explicit about output format. "Return a JSON array" or "respond in bullet points" - don't leave it open-ended. Smaller models need this.

Set a specific persona. "Expert Rust developer who cares about memory safety" gets noticeably better results than "helpful assistant."

State constraints. "No preamble", "reference line numbers", "max 5 bullet points" - tell the model what not to do as well as what to do.

Include surrounding context. For code generation, send imports, types, and function signatures - not just the function body.

One call at a time. As of v2.8.0, houtini-lm enforces this automatically with a request semaphore. Parallel calls queue up and run one at a time, so each gets the full timeout budget instead of stacking.

Think-block handling

Some models emit <think>...</think> reasoning blocks before the actual answer. Houtini-lm handles this in two ways:

1. Suppression at source — at startup, houtini-lm checks each model's HuggingFace chat template for thinking support. Models that support the enable_thinking toggle (like Qwen3) get thinking disabled at inference time, reclaiming the generation budget for actual output. This detection is fully automatic — no hardcoded model lists.

2. Stripping as fallback — for models that always emit think blocks regardless (GLM Flash, Nemotron), the content is stripped after assembly so Claude gets clean output. Orphaned opening tags from truncated responses are handled too.

The quality footer flags think-blocks-stripped when stripping occurred, so you know the model was reasoning internally even though the output is clean.

Quality metadata

Every response includes structured quality signals in the footer so Claude (or any orchestrator) can make informed trust decisions:

Model: qwen3-coder-30b-a3b | 413→81 tokens | TTFT: 2355ms, 15.0 tok/s, 5.4s
Quality: think-blocks-stripped, tokens-estimated
Session: 494 tokens offloaded across 1 call

Flags include: TRUNCATED (partial result), think-blocks-stripped, tokens-estimated (usage data was missing, estimated from content length), hit-max-tokens. When no flags fire, the quality line is omitted — clean output, nothing to report.

Session metrics resource

The houtini://metrics/session MCP resource exposes cumulative offload stats as JSON. Claude can read this proactively to make smarter delegation decisions based on actual session performance:

{
  "session": {
    "totalCalls": 14,
    "promptTokens": 3200,
    "completionTokens": 5250,
    "totalTokensOffloaded": 8450
  },
  "perModel": {
    "qwen3-coder-30b-a3b": {
      "calls": 14,
      "avgTtftMs": 2100,
      "avgTokPerSec": 15.2
    }
  }
}

Request serialisation

Parallel MCP tool calls are automatically queued and run one at a time. Most local LLM servers run a single model — without serialisation, parallel requests stack timeouts and waste the generation budget. The semaphore ensures each call gets the full timeout window.

Configuration

Compatible endpoints

Works with anything that speaks the OpenAI /v1/chat/completions API:

Streaming and timeouts

All inference uses Server-Sent Events streaming. Tokens arrive incrementally. As of v2.8.0, houtini-lm sends MCP progress notifications on every streamed chunk, which resets the SDK's 60-second client timeout. This means generation can run as long as the model needs — there's no hard ceiling as long as tokens keep flowing.

If the connection stalls (no new tokens for an extended period), you get a partial result instead of a timeout error. The footer shows TRUNCATED when this happens, and the quality metadata flags it so Claude knows to treat the output with appropriate caution.

Architecture

index.ts          Main MCP server - tools, streaming, session tracking
model-cache.ts    SQLite-backed model profile cache (sql.js / WASM)
                  Auto-profiles models via HuggingFace API at startup
                  Persists to ~/.houtini-lm/model-cache.db

Inference:        POST /v1/chat/completions  (OpenAI-compatible, works everywhere)
Model metadata:   GET  /api/v0/models        (LM Studio, falls back to /v1/models)
Embeddings:       POST /v1/embeddings        (OpenAI-compatible)

Development

git clone https://github.com/houtini-ai/lm.git
cd lm
npm install
npm run build

Licence

Apache-2.0