Published May 13, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf . Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. I've been running local LLMs for several months now, and I'll be honest, it's more capable than I expected, but also more hands-on than I wanted. There is a performance drop compared to cloud AI, however, that's surprisingly manageable - the other thing is the interface and infrastructure. Local models don't ship with a polished chat app; you run them through a runner like LM Studio or llama.cpp, and even the ones with GUIs are a different experience from something like Claude or Gemini.…