I Ditched the Cloud Model for a Local One. Here’s What Actually Broke.

Part 3 of my series on building a personal AI agent that actually works I thought it would take an afternoon. I had a working setup - OpenClaw running on an Ubuntu VM, Obsidian as long-term memory, Telegram as the main interface. My agent Neog was waking me up every morning with a CAC40 brief and a quick AI news digest. Everything was powered by a cloud model. It worked. It was fast. It could write long articles in one shot without breaking a sweat. Then I decided to go local. The reasons felt solid: no API costs, no data leaving my machine, full control over the model.