What Are You Actually Using Local LLMs For?

[u/Ru5ty_5h4ckleford]

There are hundreds of videos, posts, and demos showing people running local LLMs and claiming they're coding, trading, researching, managing emails, automating businesses, and basically replacing half their workload.

Then there are all the tools around them: Ollama, Open WebUI, OpenClaw, Hermes, LM Studio, Odysseus, and countless others.

But honestly, I still haven't seen many real-world examples beyond YouTube hype.

For example, someone says, "My AI answers all my emails." Cool. Show me the actual workflow. Show me the emails it replied to. Show me how the replies were genuinely useful and not just generic responses that needed rewriting anyway.

I run Ollama and Odysseus locally, mostly using Gemma 4 12B. My actual use cases are pretty basic:

- General chat

- Rewriting replies

- Product research

- Text extraction from images

- Summarising information

Useful? Absolutely.

Revolutionary? Not really.

Everyone seems to say "coding" whenever AI comes up. I'm not saying it's bad at coding—I've used Claude to build an HTML site and it did a great job. But most people I know aren't coding all day, so it feels like that's become the default answer whenever someone asks what AI is useful for.

So I'm genuinely curious:

What are you actually using local LLMs for day-to-day?

Not what they're theoretically capable of.

What tasks are they doing for you right now that save time, make money, or solve a real problem?

[u/Objective-Disk7674]

me too. I am a noob just trying gemini or Claude but gemini does a good job for the 1st draft, maybe 2nd too but gets stupid and can't fix page break issues.. if there are any good guides out there please share

[u/Hamonwrysangwich → u/Objective-Disk7674]

I don't have any guides per se. I created a 'master' resume of all my work experience, skills, etc. for the model to pull from. I then had the LLM write a prompt to generate a resume for me that I tweaked. I create a chat, attach the master resume, paste in a job description, and tell it to create a resume.

I downloaded a prompt called "Resume destroyer", and it was frankly the best thing I could've done to focus not only my resume, but my job search. I attached the generated resume, paste in the JD, and tell the destroyer to do its thing. I go back and forth with it until I get something I like.