Calling all local builders - drop your stack y'all!

This is the only place I can talk local ai without getting blank stares, so let's actually see what everyone is running.

I'll go first. here's the whole stack:

HARDWARE

▸ Alita - personal dual-3090 rig at home. 48gb total vram, 128gb ram. kept totally separate from anything work related.

MODELS

▸ primary: qwen3.6-35b-a3b on gpu0, served by llama.cpp. mixture-of-experts, ~3b params fire per token. q8 kv cache, 256k context.

▸ router: a ~9b qwen on ollama out front, deciding what's actually worth waking the big model for.

▸ embeddings: qwen3-embedding 0.6b and nomic-embed-text, same ollama instance.

AGENT LAYER

▸ hermes, running as Alita here. three daily jobs: morning brief, work email summary, personal email summary. all land in discord.

▸ weekly maintenance runs on a different scheduler with hermes as the watchdog, on purpose. runner dies, watcher yells. watcher dies, the daily jobs go quiet and I notice. two failure domains instead of one.

MEMORY

▸ obsidian vault as the source of truth.

▸ hybrid search over it - bm25 plus local embeddings, running in-process. no extra service to babysit.

▸ qdrant for the vector-store work that actually needs one.

INTERFACE

▸ the observatory - a front end I built over the vault. not a dashboard. a command center I actually work from: projects as boards, sessions as a timeline, drafts moving through a publishing pipeline, all of it reading and writing the same markdown files.

The one piece I would not give up is the vault. the models change every few months. the notes are forever.

The thing that taught me the most had nothing to do with hardware. I did kill a pile of containers nothing was consuming - n8n, a web ui, a couple databases - but that was housekeeping. the real one was giving up on folders. I spent a long time sorting notes into the right directory and it was wrong again six months later. Now every note carries its own frontmatter and the folders are just a cache I regenerate from it. Type isn't a folder. Status isn't a folder. The structure lives in the file.

That rebuild is what the next couple of these posts are about - the structure itself and the map of how all the pieces actually connect.

YOUR TURN. TELL ME:

1. what model(s) you run locally

2. what hardware it lives on

3. what you actually use it for day to day

4. the one piece you would not give up

5. the thing that broke and taught you something

6. 😍 pic of your rig

Doesn't have to be fancy. Lets all share and comment on each others rigs and stacks!

Half the reason I build local is I don't want my stuff living in someone else's cloud. The other half is it's just fun. Curious how many of you are in it for which reason.

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Calling all local builders - drop your stack y'all!