Five Days of Living with a Local LLM on an M4 MacBook
Last week I wrote Five days before Google I/O, the AI front has split into three , and at the end I dropped one line: "Local LLMs are lonely." That line stayed in my head all week. It read too clean. A snapshot of five limits laid out at one moment in time, then a verdict. So I decided to spend five days actually living inside that snapshot… May 11 Monday morning to May 15 Friday evening. Exactly five days. The rule was simple. Run the main workflow on a local LLM. The Anthropic and OpenAI APIs stay on, but every time my hand reaches for one, redirect it to Ollama instead. Log every escape. Then at the end of the five days, look at what hardened and what scattered. By Friday evening, two things had happened at once. My usual five-day API bill of around $45 stopped at $14. That was the intended result. But every single day I escaped to the cloud once or twice, sometimes three times. The interesting part wasn't that I escaped. It was that the escapes weren't acts of ...