Real-world
Documents
Concrete workflows, including the tradeoffs and limitations reported by their authors.
this collection
Grading 500 student exams with a local model
A teacher runs an entire exam-correction pipeline on a single 3090, from generating answer sheets to scoring hundreds of students automatically.
A RAG pipeline for docs and mail, plus questions too private for cloud chat
This person is building an ingestion pipeline that reads their documents and mail and auto-creates follow-up todos, alongside using local models for questions they don't want tied to their identity.
Document review with an air-gapped mirror as the safety net
Cron jobs and document review through Hermes, with files kept on a NAS behind a one-way mirror so a bad run can't take real data with it.
A fully local OCR and RAG pipeline for a self-hosted document server
Rather than one big general model, this setup uses several small, fast ones for narrowly scoped, deterministic jobs — starting with OCR and metadata for a self-hosted Paperless document server.
An uncensored local model as an escape hatch from frontier guardrails
Part of a hybrid RAG setup spanning a Mac Studio, a MacBook, GCP, and OpenRouter, with an unrestricted local model used specifically for questions frontier chat products decline to answer.
A second-pass file organizer for what Hazel can't handle
A vibe-coded Mac app uses OCR and vision to rename and file sensitive documents by local rules, running only after a faster, non-AI tool has already taken its pass.
Kept paying for cheap cloud coding subs; local stays on an iGPU for light tasks
Weighed building a dedicated inference box against just paying for cheap cloud models — for now, cloud wins for anything demanding, while a laptop's integrated graphics handles the light stuff.