Ollama

On June 16, Vicki Boykis’s “Running local models is good now” hit Hacker News at #4 — 1044 points, 437 comments. Her machine is a 2022 M2 Mac, 64GB of RAM, 1TB of storage. Not an M3 Ultra workstation. The boring developer default. But Vicki did one useful thing in the post: she defined a personal vibe metric — “am I still double-checking against a cloud API?” — and then admitted that after GPT-OSS she does that “a lot less often,” and with the latest Gemma 4 release she can finally run local agentic coding loops at roughly 75% the accuracy and speed of frontier models. ...

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. ...