A guy was paying $200/mo for Claude Max. His subscription burned through in 3 hours of work.
He bought a base Mac Mini for $599. Installed 5 local models on it. One command. One flag.
His office neighbors thought he was mining crypto.
He just taught the machine to sort messages, compress context, and keep the system alive while he sleeps.
At 4am Claude hit its rate limit. The local model picked up. In the morning he read the logs - everything worked. He didn't even wake up.
A team doing the same thing - that's 3 engineers and $15,000/mo on API costs.
He paid $599 once.
35 billion parameters on 16 gigs of memory. Everyone said impossible. One flag in one command proved them all wrong.
And people like him - there's only a handful so far.