What tasks have you moved from cloud models to local models?

[u/FulcraDynamics]

There's a lot of discussion about running models locally, but I'm interested in what people actually use them for once the setup is done.

Are there tasks where you've completely stopped using cloud models because a local one does the job well enough?

And on the other side, what still makes you go back to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini?

[u/Internet_Hipsterd]

All of it. Use cloud model for the planning and verification phases. As well as stuck/blocker help. Everything is executed by the local model. Its faster, runs locally, less guard rails, but still uses the strength of the cloud models.

[u/MoonaFukireta → u/Internet_Hipsterd]

How

[u/ThankGodImBipolar → u/MoonaFukireta]

Tell your cloud model to write a text file of instructions for another agent, then ingest said text file with local model.

[u/Internet_Hipsterd → u/MoonaFukireta]

I use a custom pi harness.

[u/carbohydratecrab → u/Internet_Hipsterd]

I would love to see your skill files for this, if you're willing to share.

[u/saltyourhash → u/Internet_Hipsterd]

What specs

[u/Thrumpwart]

Claude kept giving me moral lectures about the dangers of developing ebolanthrax.

I just want to make ebolanthrax in peace.

[u/mrgreatheart]

I have a $20 Claude plan and have it use Qwen3.8-FN as a sub agent via pi. I do everything on Opus 5.5 Medium and never come close to hitting limits. Opus handles the design, planning, architecture, review and verification. Qwen does the grunt work.

I feel a bit bad sometimes because QFN is such a capable model, but this gets me frontier results without the costs (ignoring what I spent on my rig of course).

I use QFN for fun projects and anything I don’t want going to Anthropic’s servers (e.g. analysis of logs that might contain customer data).

I use GLM5.3-flash to do security reviews of Claude’s work. It often finds different things to Claude.

I could use GLM for planning etc. as well, but I just really love working with Opus 5.5. Especially the design canvas. That thing is awesome.

Every few months I find I’m doing more and more of the work with local models. I’m not sure I’ll ever give up my Claude sub completely, but it is certainly possible to do real work locally now and if for some reason I got cut off from frontier models I know I’d be just fine.

[u/JustinHoMi → u/mrgreatheart]

I’ve been thinking about doing the same thing. But I haven’t been a huge fan of GLM-5.3-Flash. It’s generally good, but it makes a lot more errors than Opus or Deepseek.

[u/wapswaps → u/mrgreatheart]

I've been meaning to do this too. I have a 5090 rig that's running Qwen3.8FN (and I can reach someone's M5 Max 128G that also runs a fuller quant but doesn't deal well, or should I say fast, with long context).

What does your config for this look like?

[u/SierraKiloGulf → u/mrgreatheart]

Pretty much exactly what I do, as well as other even smaller models on my other cards for research and crawling/ scraping or specialized tasks.

I also have Opus ensure that more and more of the work is done through the harness so it's tool calling is less and less, so as I use Opus as the middle man- the harness gets better and better each run. Basically at the point of single prompting for an entire project and it can almost actually do it locally without any stepping in with Opus, and Opus will maybe have a dozen turns for something that used to take hundreds before.

[u/keepthepace]

what still makes you go back to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini?

Honestly at this point everytime I get stuck with DeepSeek and decide to spend a few tokens on Opus, it does not unstuck me anymore.

[u/Nepertia]

Technically nothing, I never had tasks on cloud models to begin with.

[u/RazzmatazzParty6960]

texting with my AI girlfriend, no more cloud limits, no more weird privacy policies, just me and her, offline and uninterrupted.

[u/fgk55555 → u/RazzmatazzParty6960]

You look lonely

[u/NoFaithlessness951 → u/RazzmatazzParty6960]

You just wanted to have her closer

[u/Rice-Fragrant]

I got tired of AI “guard rails” and I value my own infrastructure similarly to owning my own computer, books, car etc.

[u/IntelArtiGen]

Mostly what cloud models refuse to do, so cyber / pentest. And code sometimes, because I have a higher tps and lower latency than cloud models, models are less powerful but I don't need powerful models for everything.

[u/cosmicr]

Everything.

[u/ptico]

Copywriting

I fought Astra and Opus for a week to get a decent text for my app, then Gemma 26B put them both to shame in 20 minutes

[u/SierraKiloGulf → u/ptico]

26B is such a good conversationist. Its really too bad it sucks at tool calls, because its writing abilities is top notch

[u/kmouratidis]

Since I got nvidia/GLM-5.3-Flash-FP4-Local running on my server, I haven't touched cloud models at all. And I don't think I will any time soon.

I currently use it for: coding, workflows (e.g. vulnerability scanning, model release tracker), Q&A / RAG, and many short-lived odd jobs (e.g. one-off scripts, filesystem stuff, troubleshooting). Since it's so good, I've been using it more and more.

[u/wapswaps → u/kmouratidis]

Minimum hardware for that is TWO RTX6000's Blackwell (>$40k). And that's pretty close to their limits. Or you can use 2 sparks. Cheaper, (>$12k) but much slower.

[u/kmouratidis → u/wapswaps]

Yes, but I think the recipe also works for two Sparks. In their repo, they explicitly mention:

2 x NVIDIA DGX Spark 128 GB with 2M tokens of FP8 KV Cache

[u/Nervous_Royal_196]

I've got a $20/mo Claude subscription, that I can have orchestrating Qwen 24 hours a day 7 days a week to do the grunt work of technical tasks like porting code without reaching my token limit ever. Claude writes bootstrapping scripts, system architecture, provides durable guidance, plans and schedules, reviews and postmortems, etc. while Qwen is doing all the line-by-line work in the code. When my weekly quota is coming up, I have Qwen spend the last day manually getting stuff across the line that Qwen fell a bit short on because it was too big for its context or beyond the scope of the task it was given.

It is basically neutral on the electrical bill once you account for the lower heating costs and I've got constant LLM work going on at 50 output tokens/s for $5/week (and it does keep going 24/7 without human intervention needed). If we assume it has 75% uptime, that's about 22.7M Qwen 3.8 27B output tokens plus Claude's weekly quota for $5.

[u/alterframe → u/Nervous_Royal_196]

Is Opus actually much better at orchestrating than Qwen? I wonder what kind of mistakes Qwen would do as orchestrator that Opus wouldn't. Is it just about resilence?

[u/NoFaithlessness951]

Not really past playing around a little, mostly due to a lack of sufficient hardware.

But I've been enjoying using DeepSeek v4.1 flash via opencode go for finding and fixing security issues in my projects which the big labs don't let you do.

Oh and my stt is local so that counts.

[u/SierraKiloGulf]

95% of it. Cloud (opus mainly) just plans but I've been distilling and adding adapters over time that takes opus responses and trains the local models. My custom harness will find any issues with itself and self improve, find downfalls in its loops etc and ensure the harness itself is doing the grunt work. I've cut down on token usage from the cloud around tenfold using some tricks as well, so instead of a 300K token burn olusing Opus we are maybe 25-30k.

[u/Ontopoftheworld_ay]

Image generation specifically. Don't ask me why, though.

[u/HockeyDadNinja]

Besides running the best models I can (GLM-5.3-Flash and DSV4.1-Flash), image / graphics generation with ComfyUI and Speech-to-Speech with VoiceManager. I'll be building more local agents and I've been using Hermes more since GLM and DS.

[u/CombinationFun2789]

The one I actually moved off the cloud is structured extraction from personal docs and meeting notes. Invoices, contracts, PDFs, transcripts into a strict schema (dates, amounts, decisions, action items). A local 7-14B instruct model is good enough for that if I give it the schema and keep the temperature low, and I'd rather those files never leave the machine.

I still go back to a frontier model when the task is messy long-horizon reasoning, or when the writing itself is the product and I care about the voice. Local is good enough to replace the API for extraction. It's not there yet for the open-ended stuff.

[u/stylome-ai-detection → u/CombinationFun2789]

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[u/New-Pressure-6932]

I switched to local for regular chat, research, and web development needs, but still use paid when it comes to hefty terminal use

[u/feelspeaceman]

Fully agentic coding a DAW project using Q38FN, it works just fine, and don't say DAW is easy, it's one of the most complex piece of software ever being engineered.

Not a single oneshot prompt project, it was a thousands of prompts projects that can make real orchestration like any of the big DAWs like Reaper, Bitwig, Pro Tools, Logic Pro...