Only 10 of 89 AI starter templates work with local models out of the box
If you want to build an AI app that runs on your own models, the starter you fork matters. We track 89 open-source starter templates for AI apps, and each entry records what the README says about models and what you need
If you want to build an AI app that runs on your own models, the starter you fork matters. We track 89 open-source starter templates for AI apps, and each entry records what the README says about models and what you need to bring.
54 of 89 list an API key as a requirement. OpenAI is the usual one: 49 templates support it, Anthropic shows up in 20, and a lot of them sit on the Vercel AI SDK (21) or LangGraph/LangChain (19).
10 work with local models out of the box, through Ollama or something similar. morphic, agent-service-toolkit, fragments, ai-town and llm-answer-engine are in that group.
In a cloud-first template, swapping the provider is usually a small edit. If running local is the whole point, though, starting from one of those 10 skips that work.
They lean TypeScript, by the way: 56 of 89, with 19 in Python.
The full list, with what each template has wired in and what you still have to build: https://github.com/archestack/best-of-ai-starters
Written with help from AI tools. Numbers from the list's public data, checked on 2026-10-09.
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes β full credit and traffic to the original publisher.