The frustrating problem You set up a local model runner, downloaded a decent 7B or 13B, pointed it at a folder of your personal notes... and the answers are garbage. It either hallucinates wildly or returns "I don't have information about that" when the answer is literally in the documents you fed it. I've been down this rabbit hole for the past few months trying to build a personal knowledge base for non-coding life stuff — medical history, financial records, journal entries, recipe notes, household maintenance logs. The promise is great: local, private, no API costs, no data going to a vendor. The reality is that most "just point LLM at folder" setups produce frustratingly bad results. The issue almost never is the model. It's the retrieval layer. Root cause: garbage in, garbage out When you ask a local LLM about your documents, you're not actually feeding it all your documents at once. The context window can't hold them.…