Buy the Metal: Local Inference Is a Hedge, Not a Hobby

> I am not telling you to run your coding agent’s frontier reasoning on a box in your closet. You can’t, not at parity, not yet. I’m telling you that a huge fraction of the tokens flowing through a mature AI workflow are doing unglamorous work that a good open-weights model on your own hardware does just fine — and every one of those you pull back in-house is a token that no longer shows up on someone else’s invoice with a markup on top.