Can a Local LLM Run My AI Assistant?

An experiment tested if a local LLM could replace Claude as the brain for a personal AI agent with 90 tools. An initial attempt using a 30B model on a single RTX 3090 performed poorly, scoring 22.8/100 and suffering from frequent errors and malformed outputs. After upgrading the hardware to three RTX 3090s and using a 122B model with a larger context window, the local system's score jumped to 80.0/100. This upgraded local setup proved to be approximately 787 times cheaper than the Claude API, prompting the switch for the production agent.