Hey everyone,
I wanted to share a little side project I cooked up over the last week. So, long story short, I only started diving into the LLM world in February, and honestly, it’s been a wild ride. I started with LM Studio, but as many of you know, by the time you get comfortable with one tool, a new "insane" feature post drops on r/LocalLLaMA and the software is already playing catch-up. I eventually settled on using plain llama.cpp because it seems to be the gold standard, but I kept hitting a wall: the update cycle is so fast, and manually updating it feels a bit ... clunky, especially since there's no integrated updater bundled, especially for those juicy new beta versions that get released so often.
So.. about a week ago, while watching The Wire (adhd at its finest), for some reason I had the idea that basically: Why isn't there an nvm but for llama.cpp?
Coming from the Node.js world, I was missing the simplicity of nvm, so I wanted something that lets me swap, install, uninstall and manage versions on the fly without a headache. So, alongside Claude and my local Qwen 35B (mostly Qwen), I decided to "vibe code" it into existence (I can't believe I'm using this term). The models suggested Go (since it's great for CLI tools), and even though I don't actually know how to write a single line of Go, we made it work.
The gist:
It’s a lightweight version manager that handles the heavy lifting for you. Instead of hunting GitHub releases, you just do:
-
lvm install latest(Gets the right build for your GPU) -
lvm use(Switches active version, there's a selection prompt) -
lvm ls(See what you've got installed)
It uses "shims" to make sure commands like llama-cli or llama-server always point to whatever version you currently have selected as active. So no more manual PATH hacking every time a new build drops. Now, I understand that many people use docker to create containers of different versions and whatnot, but I wanted something simpler for the regular guy.
Disclaimer:
This is a "vibe code" project. It took me about a week, and while it works surprisingly well for what I need, I am definitely not a Go developer. There are edge cases to polish, more testing to do, and things I probably overlooked because I don't know the language deeply. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I wanted to contribute something small back to the community, at least for the time being. If there are any Go wizards out there who see potential in this, please grab it! Star it, Fork it, fix the bugs, polish the edge cases; help me turn this from a "fun experiment" into a polished tool.
Check out the repo here: https://github.com/asertym/lvm
I’d love to hear what you guys think. Is this something that would actually make your workflow smoother, or am I overthinking a problem that doesn't exist? And again, if anyone who actually knows Go wants to take the reins and turn this into something robust, I would be incredibly stoked.
Let me know your thoughts!
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