Guessing local versus remote wastes both battery and tokens. Measure three gates before any prompt leaves disk. Connectivity, secret residue, and wall-clock cost decide the hop.
A laptop is a workshop on your desk. A remote model is a mill across town. You do not crate the shop for one cut.
House keys do not travel with the lumber. Secrets inside a prompt are those house keys. A free mill still sits far across town.
This article is a measurement workflow, not a bake-off. The script below is a labeled example only. Run it locally and trust only its clocks.
Coding agents now plan, search, and generate together. Local context is cheap to read from disk. Completion on a cold CPU can stall hard.
