#opinion

I bought a NUC to run local LLMs and escape API costs. Then I tested local, free cloud, and paid cloud against the same prompts. The result wasn't 'pay for inference' or 'run it yourself' — it was that 'fast and free' isn't a quadrant that exists right now, and that has implications for anyone planning a personal AI setup.

I've spent months building Android apps — todo, drawing, live wallpaper, launcher, Kotlin Multiplatform, full-stack with Ktor — entirely with Claude Code, without writing a line myself. This is an honest account of what worked, what didn't, what it cost, and what I think it means for how software gets built next.