Local models are finally starting to feel pleasant instead of just "possible." The headless LM Studio flow is especially nice because it makes local inference usable from real tools instead of as a demo.

Related note from someone building in this space: I've been working on cloclo (https://www.npmjs.com/package/cloclo), an open-source coding agent CLI, and this is exactly the direction I'm excited about. It natively supports LM Studio, Ollama, vLLM, Jan, and llama.cpp as providers alongside cloud models, so you can swap between local and hosted backends without changing how you work.

Feels like we're getting closer to a good default setup where local models are private/cheap enough to use daily, and cloud models are still there when you need the extra capability.