Zest is a UI that bundles Lemonade server (which installs llama.cpp and whatever backends are needed) and the Pi agent to provide a friendly interface for people who don't want to be messing around with command-line servers and parameters.
It comes and all the functionality needed for a new user without getting in the way. Just download an appimage, go through the start tour, and you're set up and ready to go. There are sane defaults baked in (like 128k context) and model recommendations (all tried and tested on 10GB VRAM to 26GB).
r/LocalLLaMA - Introducing Zest: model server + agent + friendly GUI
It comes with helpful docs, links to places to understand more about the subject - in short, everything needed for a new user. Model recommendations are based on my own testing on multiple machines with consumer GPUs - an old Xeon with two Radeon VIIs, a rig with a 4080 Super + a 3080, a rig with a venerable 1080. The goal is to present good choices for most hardware.
Entirely open-source, of course. If you have anyone you want to introduce to the world of local AI, please see if this is useful. And if you have ideas, suggestions - please open an issue, send a PR, and so on.
Why lemonade and Pi?
Lemonade: because it does a great job of handling backends and providing a server.
Pi: because it's a simple, elegant agent
Both are very easy to package in something like this and bring together. And because I'm lazy: both projects are receiving steady updates, because I don't want to write yet another inference server from scratch
What it isn't:
It's not for advanced users. There are jobs, but no subagents, for instance: in this case the Pi philosophy really helped.
In fact, I myself use Strata and Opencode, so for advanced users, it recommends those in the Help section
How is this different from Unsloth desktop / Atomic chat etc?
It isn't. It just tries to be a lot more lightweight and user-friendly: I decided to do this after getting said friend to download and set up llama.cpp, Unsloth Desktop, Opencode etc . . .
I noticed that at some point both choice paralysis and confusion with options just took over, and there was no easy way for them as a newcomer to figure out what x thing was really for. Every setting in Zest is explained. Including what inference engines do, the works.
Everything is explained at basic levels - what a model is, how it works, and so on. I've kept the lemonade + pi analogy while trying to make sure the interface was intuitive.
Oddly enough I never played SimCity. Closest from those times for me were Ceasar III and Pharaoh (which I'm playing again now: there's a very good remake).
Cows don't roam free in Sri Lankan cities, either. You are aware that South Asia is a subcontinent and a whole set of islands, and not one singular city,right?
I have heard many Hindus consider the cow a holy animal and let them roam where they please. And there are many Hindus in Sri Lanka (though there are more buddhists who don't consider cows holy but are vegetarians).
And yes I know the region pretty well. I've lived more than half my life outside my home country (in 3 different ones). Though never been to Sri Lanka no.
Never seen a single cow on the road in Sri Lanka. Though I only visited the western half of the country from about the Colombo to Kandy line down to the very southernmost tip.
However, the other settings seem about right to conservative vs. reality. I literally just got out of the airport in a taxi and thought I was gonna die, so fast and close to an oncoming car was the taxi going. Probably about two atoms worth of "air" between their side mirror and the taxi's.
Traffic lights might as well not exist. Everyone was just going through the intersection at the same time. No elephants on the raods either but an army of Tuk Tuks. Actually preferable to car taxis. Never took one again. Bus travel was interesting as well.
Most Buddhists are not vegetarians. There's a huge gap between Wikipedia stats and real life, as it is the case everywhere.
Using "Knowing the region pretty well" to be confident about a country you've never set foot in is like me assuming alligators are roaming free in corn fields in Iowa because I've been to a few states in US and have seen Florida through youtube.
So because the number of active vehicles is much lower than reality, the road network is actually a lot more efficient: it’s a nearly 1:1 scale city with less than a fifth of the real vehicles that would take up the streets.
Mostly because of this, public transport in game is a lot better than our particular reality. In fact, the trains are completely underutilized - we can tweak transport modal share (and should) to get the numbers to balance better.
https://github.com/yudhanjaya/Zest
What it is:
Zest is a UI that bundles Lemonade server (which installs llama.cpp and whatever backends are needed) and the Pi agent to provide a friendly interface for people who don't want to be messing around with command-line servers and parameters.
It comes and all the functionality needed for a new user without getting in the way. Just download an appimage, go through the start tour, and you're set up and ready to go. There are sane defaults baked in (like 128k context) and model recommendations (all tried and tested on 10GB VRAM to 26GB).
r/LocalLLaMA - Introducing Zest: model server + agent + friendly GUI It comes with helpful docs, links to places to understand more about the subject - in short, everything needed for a new user. Model recommendations are based on my own testing on multiple machines with consumer GPUs - an old Xeon with two Radeon VIIs, a rig with a 4080 Super + a 3080, a rig with a venerable 1080. The goal is to present good choices for most hardware.
Entirely open-source, of course. If you have anyone you want to introduce to the world of local AI, please see if this is useful. And if you have ideas, suggestions - please open an issue, send a PR, and so on.
Why lemonade and Pi?
Lemonade: because it does a great job of handling backends and providing a server.
Pi: because it's a simple, elegant agent
Both are very easy to package in something like this and bring together. And because I'm lazy: both projects are receiving steady updates, because I don't want to write yet another inference server from scratch
What it isn't:
It's not for advanced users. There are jobs, but no subagents, for instance: in this case the Pi philosophy really helped.
In fact, I myself use Strata and Opencode, so for advanced users, it recommends those in the Help section
How is this different from Unsloth desktop / Atomic chat etc?
It isn't. It just tries to be a lot more lightweight and user-friendly: I decided to do this after getting said friend to download and set up llama.cpp, Unsloth Desktop, Opencode etc . . .
I noticed that at some point both choice paralysis and confusion with options just took over, and there was no easy way for them as a newcomer to figure out what x thing was really for. Every setting in Zest is explained. Including what inference engines do, the works.
Everything is explained at basic levels - what a model is, how it works, and so on. I've kept the lemonade + pi analogy while trying to make sure the interface was intuitive.
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