Mac Studio M2 Max (64GB) as a private coding assistant
A freelancer working on client code ran a fully local stack for 3 months: Ollama + Qwen2.5-Coder-32B via Continue.dev, with Open WebUI for longer chats.
Source: r/LocalLLaMA
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Browse 16 setups Submit yoursA freelancer working on client code ran a fully local stack for 3 months: Ollama + Qwen2.5-Coder-32B via Continue.dev, with Open WebUI for longer chats.
Source: r/LocalLLaMA
A developer runs Ollama on a headless Ubuntu desktop with an RTX 3090 and connects laptops via the Continue VS Code plugin. The 32B model was too heavy in practice, so 7B is used.
Source: Arul Selvam Periyasamy (blog)
A tested guide (Ollama v0.24.0, Continue v1.2.22) for running chat, tab-completion and codebase search on an 8GB NVIDIA GPU.
Source: aifoss.dev
A GitHub issue documents that Continue used ~9.5GB VRAM vs ~6GB for the same model in the Ollama CLI, fixed by lowering contextLength and maxTokens.
Source: GitHub continuedev/continue #6609
A beginner-friendly walkthrough: Ollama runs Llama 3 on an M4 Mac mini, AnythingLLM Desktop provides the UI and local LanceDB vector store.
Source: Benjamin S Powell
AnythingLLM + Ollama (llama3.1:8b) on a Mac mini M4, exposed through a Cloudflare Tunnel protected by Cloudflare Access, queried from Telegram via n8n.
Source: Ovidiu Eftimie (Substack)
A careful workflow for chatting with documents on a single machine, including a hallucination test (ask a question the document can't answer).
Source: localai.computer
IBM's Granite community recipe for running a basic local RAG over a PDF (e.g. a budget document) on your laptop.
Source: IBM Granite Community (GitHub)
A local legal stack guide: a silent Mac mini M4 Pro with 48GB unified memory running Ollama with one AnythingLLM workspace per matter, plus encryption and a written AI policy.
Source: runlocalai.co
A 1-attorney/1-paralegal/2-admin firm asked if a Mac Studio M3 Ultra could handle file sorting and first-pass record review. Replies say hardware is the easy part; PDF/OCR ingestion and guardrails are the real work.
Source: r/LocalLLM
Audio uploaded from a phone PWA is transcribed on a local RTX 3060 (12GB) with faster-whisper int8, sharing the card with an embedding model and Gemma.
Source: DEV Community (hannune)
whisper.cpp (CUDA) with large-v3 on an office PC, behind nginx + n8n for auth, exposing an OpenAI-compatible endpoint used from desktop, iPhone, iPad and Android.
Source: Mr Hoelee (blog)
whisper_api offloads transcription to one GPU server shared by several people; the author suggests the RTX 3060 12GB as the cheapest option for high-quality models.
Source: MayNiklas/whisper_api (GitHub)
Tailscale's Alex Kretzschmar passes an NVIDIA A4000 through to a NixOS VM on Proxmox, runs Ollama + Open WebUI in Docker, and exposes it privately with Tailscale Serve (TLS, no reverse proxy).
Source: Tailscale blog
Hosting provider HOSTKEY built a tech-support assistant for its front-line team: cleaned Markdown docs, Open WebUI RAG (ChromaDB), a custom model with a strict system prompt.
Source: HOSTKEY blog
A small startup asked for the cheapest way to self-host; a top suggestion was to buy used and build around 2x 24GB RTX 3090s for a 32B model.
Source: r/ollama
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