Serious AI-assisted development has a habit of turning into a stack of subscriptions: a coding-assistant plan, a market-data API, a backtesting service, model credits. Each one is reasonable on its own, and together they quietly become a monthly bill that also locks you into someone else's rate limits.
I wanted to know how far you can get without any of that. The answer turned out to be: surprisingly far. Here's the stack I ended up with, running at $0 recurring cost and scripted so it rebuilds from scratch.
The goal
A capable, agentic AI workflow — coding and quantitative research — running entirely on free and local infrastructure, and reproducible so it isn't a one-off config living on a single machine.
What I wired together
