Local AI vs. Cloud AI: When to Use Which (A Developer's Guide)

Running Gemma on Ollama changed how I think about AI tools. Here's the framework I use to decide when to go local and when to stay in the cloud. There's a moment every developer hits: you're mid-project, you've been routing everything through ChatGPT or Claude, and you start wondering - do I actually need to send this to an external API? What if I just ran something locally? I had that moment while working on a security automation pipeline on Parrot OS. Some of the data I was processing wasn't something I wanted to leave my machine.