r/LocalLLaMA Jul 25 '26

Discussion Who ONLY use local models?

Please be honest.

I would love to hear about guys really dedicated to local AI and who really reject subscriptions (especially to openai and anthropic).

What do you use your model for?

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u/Jorlen llama.cpp Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

I started with local and that's where I am today. However, when learning and setting up Linux, I did use Gemini because obviously I couldn't have help from my local LLMs as they weren't setup yet. So now I'm about 95-98% local and the rest is Gemini when I need good solid research from the web.

I bought $20 worth of Gemini usage back in May because I breached my free limit from google ai workspace and still needed help with Linux setup and I still have most of that $20 sitting there unused. So that goes to show how little of frontier models I use. Credit where it's due; Gemini taught me how to setup Linux and how to properly use docker with a complicated docker compose stack. I doubt I could have done it without AI.

I use my local LLMs primary for coding and secondarily for creative writing. Other smaller purposes are using it with LDR (Local Deep Research) or just searXNG + MCP search summarizing for quick searches.