Real-world
Personal assistant
Concrete workflows, including the tradeoffs and limitations reported by their authors.
this collection
A year of using local models as a general life assistant
About a year into daily local use, this setup covers private coding projects and a broader life-assistant role: web search, journal access, and photo access.
Two DGX Sparks as a daily driver, ROI aside
This person knows Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on two DGX Sparks can't match frontier intelligence, and says that's not really the point for them.
An agent that plans a wedding from your inbox
The same low-key homelab setup also runs a semi-agentic wedding planner that reads email, keeps a running database and document trail, and answers questions about where things stand — plus a separate loop that just deletes marketing mail.
Tried local for daily use, went back to cheap cloud subscriptions
A local model ran fine, but between electricity, a maxed-out machine, and cloud models costing a few euros a month, the math didn't work out.
A receipt-scanning pipeline that wakes the PC on its own
A phone app scans a receipt, a Synology NAS notices the new file and wakes the desktop, and a local model turns it into structured spending data — no manual step in between.
Email triage and a dictation-to-proper-writing tool, alongside a paid subscription
Local models here don't replace a cloud subscription so much as complement it — handling the smaller, more private slice of the workload.
Local is for tinkering; Claude still does the real work
On a VRAM-constrained 5070 Ti, this person keeps local strictly in the 'learning and playing around' lane, and routes actual work through Claude with local models as a validation step at most.
Running a local model daily, straight from a phone
One of the only mobile setups in the thread — used daily on a phone as an offline-capable stand-in for search and reference lookups.