LM Studio is a desktop application for running large language models on your own computer, and its Bionic release adds an agent for work and code. Bionic creates and edits documents, slides and PDFs, writes software, handles automations and can control the computer. It runs local models through the LM Studio runtime built on MLX and llama.cpp, includes real-time voice transcription processed on the device, and can also call cloud-hosted open models with zero data retention. The Free plan is $0, Bionic+ costs $20 per month for US-hosted open source models, and Pro costs $100 per month with five times the usage limits.
It fits developers who want to experiment with local models, privacy-conscious professionals who do not want prompts leaving their machine, and writers or analysts who want an agent to draft documents. Teams can use centralized billing through an organization with inference credits, and subscription plans for teams are coming soon. Hobbyists who enjoy testing the latest open weights benefit from downloading models directly inside the app.
Typical uses include chatting with a local model offline, asking the agent to generate a slide deck or PDF report, having it write and debug code, and dictating notes with on-device transcription in multiple languages. Heavier jobs can run on frontier open models such as GLM, Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro through the cloud option. LM Link connects up to five devices, so a model on one machine can serve another, and web search plus page extraction support research tasks on paid plans.
