[Der_Einzige]

No, I'm not going to do those things. I find extreme utility in applications that I can do with an LLM in an air-gapped environment.

I will fight and die on the hill that "LLMs don't need the internet to be useful"

[simonw]

Yeah, that's fair. A good LLM (gpt-oss-20b, even some of the smaller Qwens) can be entirely useful offline. I've got good results from Mistral Small 3.2 offline on a flight helping write Python and JavaScript, for example.

Having Claude Code able to try out JSON APIs and pip install extra packages is a huge upgrade from that though!

[furyofantares]

Is anyone fighting you on that hill?

Someone who finds it useful to have a local llm ingest internet content is not contrary to you finding uses that don't.

[kgwgk]

> Local LLMs may not be exposed to the internet, but if you want them to do something useful you're likely going to hook them up to an internet-accessing harness such as OpenCode or Claude Code or Codex CLI.

is not "someone finding useful to have a local llm ingest internet content" - it was someone suggesting that nothing useful can be done without internet access.

[furyofantares]

I guess I don't read that how you do. It says you're likely to do that, which I take to mean that's a majority use case, not that it's the only use case.

[kgwgk]

It also said "but" and "if you want them to do something useful" which made the "likely" sound much less innocent.

[simonw]

Yeah, I retracted my statement that they can't do anything useful without the internet here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45670828