Local AI

For a while, the default way to use AI has been pretty simple: subscribe to a closed-source product, open a web chat box, or pay a SaaS tool every month. That path is convenient. Closed-source products are polished, powerful, and mostly painless. You open the app and get work done. But the trade-off is becoming harder to ignore: cost, limits, opacity, and workflows locked inside someone else’s product. The shift I am watching now is this: cheap but capable local AI tools are moving from hacker toys into real alternatives. ...

The shift happened fast. Not long ago, the AI conversation was dominated by one question: whose cloud model is stronger? Now a growing number of products are pushing back toward the desktop, and very specifically toward the Mac desktop. Put Gemini on Mac, Ollama v0.19, and Google AI Edge Gallery side by side, and this no longer looks like coincidence. It looks like a market signal. My take is simple: what users actually want is not just a stronger model, but a lower-friction experience. Model quality matters, obviously. But if using the model means opening another tab, waiting on the cloud, wiring tools together, juggling prompts, and constantly losing context, even a great model starts to feel annoying. And once a tool feels annoying, it rarely becomes a habit. ...