i just spent weeks rewriting my webUI from scratch, getting rid of all AI slop within the codebase and switching it over to a proper lightweight framework (alpine.js). i am now comfortable suggesting it as an alternative to openwebUI, librechat and the like! it is made for local…

[Fully open source under GPL3, made from the ground up for use with local models, no subscriptions, no corporate backing]

When i first started this, it was meant to be a fully lightweight, extremely modular alternative to openclaw, hermes and the like, and it still is! But i noticed people especially like the webUI, to the point they'd use it as just a webUI to talk to their local models, negating all the agentic stuff. But the webUI still had a lot of AI generated code, so that didn't sit right with me!

So i rewrote the entire thing, from scratch, manually. It is now super fast, stable, uses declarative javascript without javascript framework bloat (no React or Vue or anything.. alpine.js is super lightweight)

There are only a few python dependencies. no models get installed, there is no bundled inference engine, pytorch and transformers aren't even included! I expect you to connect it to llamacpp, koboldcpp, lemonade, or something else like that. though you can also use it with cloud API's if you really want to.

This is a truly local-first webUI. I designed it from the ground up for local AI, and for once, cloud AI is the second-class citizen here.

It has many features that especially benefit local AI users: you can see how long your prompt will take to process (it's a llamacpp-exclusive feature), you can see toolcalls being written in realtime (really useful for coding), and it doesn't send any extra requests to your model, just the prompt you give it. So no extra requests just to make up a title for your chat, or to generate followup replies.

That's all in addition to the benefits that come from its harness-like design, such as support for multiple channels (telegram, discord, etc), its focus on extreme token efficiency and making the system prompt super small and concise, and its security

But using it as a pure webUI is really simple: Just switch Use Tools off in the Model tab in the settings. That will instantly make all system prompts vanish and all tools get disabled, so you're talking to your pure model with nothing getting in the way.

You do need a bit of tech knowledge, but it's not that much. right now, you need to either git clone or download a zip of the main branch off the github, but after that, all you do is run run.sh or run.bat and open the URL it shows you in your browser. Oh, you do need python installed before you do so, but that's basically it. (i'm working on making this even more user friendly though)

If you want to try it out, you can get it here: https://github.com/Rose22/openlumara

Please tell me what you think! Feedback is more than welcome, and i often implement feature requests (if they are good) and fix bugs that get reported