This is the only place I can talk local ai without getting blank stares, so let's actually see what everyone is running. I'll go first. here's the whole stack: HARDWARE ▸ Alita - personal dual-3090 rig at home. 48gb total vram, 128gb ram. kept totally separate from anything work related. MODELS ▸ primary: qwen3.6-35b-a3b on gpu0, served by llama.cpp. mixture-of-experts, ~3b params fire per token. q8 kv cache, 256k context. ▸ router: a ~9b qwen on ollama out front, deciding what's actually worth waking the big model for. ▸ embeddings: qwen3-embedding 0.6b and nomic-embed-text, same ollama instance. AGENT LAYER ▸ hermes, running as Alita here. three daily jobs: morning brief, work email summary, personal email summary. all land in discord. ▸ weekly maintenance runs on a different scheduler with hermes as the watchdog, on purpose. runner dies, watcher yells. watcher dies, the daily jobs go quiet and I notice. two failure domains instead of one. MEMORY ▸ obsidian vault as the source of truth. ▸ hybrid search over it - bm25 plus local embeddings, running in-process. no extra service to babysit. ▸ qdrant for the vector-store work that actually needs one. INTERFACE ▸ the observatory - a front end I built over the vault. not a dashboard. a command center I actually work from: projects as boards, sessions as a timeline, drafts moving through a publishing pipeline, all of it reading and writing the same markdown files. The one piece I would not give up is the vault. the models change every few months. the notes are forever. The thing that taught me the most had nothing to do with hardware. I did kill a pile of containers nothing was consuming - n8n, a web ui, a couple databases - but that was housekeeping. the real one was giving up on folders. I spent a long time sorting notes into the right directory and it was wrong again six months later. Now every note carries its own frontmatter and the folders are just a cache I regenerate from it. Type isn't a folder. Status isn't a folder. The structure lives in the file.