I’ve seen vastly more questions than answers about how people are using their local AI so I figured I’d make a post about my experience. It seems most people are looking for frontier-level coding expertise for huge projects with their setups, and that anything less is not enough. I disagree and don’t really care about that stuff. TL;DR: I used a frontier model to build the infrastructure for my local agents to persistently do tedious but outstandingly useful work on my massive collection of books, art, reports, photos, and scans. While building that infrastructure, I ensured that I received full guides, docs, and user-friendly options for designating / switching / changing local AI tasks so I’m not reaching back to the frontier agent now that it’s done. I use these agents primarily for processing hundreds of thousands of pieces of information and generating connections / curiosities about my terabytes of human-generated content so I can decide what’s worth digging into (or just briefly visiting) myself. BACKGROUND: I’ll be the first to admit I am not a coder, I am not a programmer, nor am I an expert in bash for Linux operation. I’m not a silicon valley darling, aspiring entrepreneur, or someone who only cares about LLM roleplay like I see a lot around here (no shade though, live your life!). But I’ll say that I am relatively knowledgeable compared to the general population given the amount of curiosity-based fiddling I’ve done over the years. My second admission is this: I use frontier AI for the infrastructure and first-take tasking for my local models. Yup - I’m not 100% local. Here’s the rub: I have found local models to be solidly reliable for tool usage and basic computer tasks, but not major coding projects (of which I have very few). With that said, I don’t really care about my local models’ coding ability beyond file manipulation, tool usage, and troubleshooting. But I’m not a coder, so I have a hard time creating deterministic systems for my agents to work within - that’s where the frontier AI comes in handy. So with that background out of the way, how do I use my local AI? THE GOOD PART: First, it was Hermes Agent. Tons of fun. I had an agent (local Gemma 4 31B Q4 on an RTX 5090) set up that did a phenomenal job with general tasking. I had Signal chat so I could reach it from anywhere, set cron jobs, have it pull information from files on my desktop, research via SearXNG with MY guidance in mind, and generally maintain persistent / private understanding of my life with no outside data tracking whatsoever (aside from Signal messages, which are supposedly encrypted, and what I provided via those agent SearXNG searches or browser visits, which are supposedly private). THE BETTER PART: I decided to start over, just for fun. So I decided to build out the ultimate NAS home library using frontier AI. I now have an amazing frontier-custom-built library including wikipedia, a personal google earth with points of interest representing wikipedia articles associated with geo coords, a “google earth” for the moon and mars with associated points of interest, a stackexchange replication, hundreds of thousands of books/reports, magazines, a gallery of high quality historical photographs, and a gallery of museum-quality art on my NAS. With that, I have a team of 3 local agents (2x Strix Halo boxes running GPT-OSS 120B Q4, 1x RTX 5090 running Gemma 31B Q4) reading my terabytes-worth of material and pulling out images from books, quotes, curious or interesting factoids, and linkages between works. I’ve essentially offloaded the tedious part of working through hundreds of thousands of books to my agents, and I get the benefit of a tailored way to determine what I want to read / enjoy more of. I also have one of those agents on ready-standby (as in, working 24/7 but prioritizing user-level chats) to answer any questions about the library (or find relevant books, quotes, or links) or just talk. I’ve essentially created my own internet within the walls of my home, and it’s not algorithmically fucking me and selling my attention. There are no dark patterns, ads, FOMO, or short form attention-span-reducing videos. I want to spend time in my own digital space, and it’s one of the best things I’ve done for myself. My only cost was not even the full amount of frontier tokens allocated to a $20 subscription, and the obvious provision of my project information to the frontier company who built it. Let me know if you have any questions.   submitted by   /u/GunmetalZen [link]   [comments]