The default assumption is still this: AI means cloud API. You send your text, your audio, or your document to an endpoint, pay per token, and get a result back.
For many tasks, that is perfectly valid.
For a specific class of tasks, it is the wrong default. In my setup, those tasks run locally, on my own hardware, inside my own network. No document or transcript content is sent to an external AI endpoint.
This is not a religious argument about local versus cloud. It is a decision logic. Here is how I think about it, including the real costs.
The Three Reasons, in the Right Order
