Seven attempts, seven different wrong answers — lessons from setting up a local LLM.

It’s tax season, which means I’ve been staring at a notes file full of stock sales — 23 transactions across the year that I needed to total up. The kind of data I’d rather not paste into a chat window I don’t control.

I’d been meaning to set up a local LLM anyway, and this seemed like the perfect low-stakes test. M3 Max, 64GB of unified memory, plenty of headroom for a real model. I installed Ollama, pulled Qwen 2.5 Coder, pasted the list, asked the question.