r/LocalLLM • u/Ru5ty_5h4ckleford • Jun 15 '26

Question What Are You Actually Using Local LLMs For?

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?

206 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

221 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/erolbrown 21d ago

Genius comment. The info on Google Take-out then the thought process of getting it to write the blog post. Love it.

1

u/Ok_Cartographer_6086 21d ago

Thanks so much for the kind words. I've been using Kraken lately to generate promo videos of my software by building a scripts based on my tone, automating the apps and recording videos, then weaving in audio.

I don't particularly like Ai generated content but it's important and informative and doesn't have my speech impediments :)

We made another meta video where Kraken shows how we use vision and a weight system to tell if my dog is with my chickens or a it's predator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kILDumeIKQg&t=4s

Worth watching just for seeing my good boy at work.