My Local AI Stack, Mid-2026: What Survived and What I Dropped

Six months ago I wrote up my local AI setup and a reader bookmarked it, tried to reproduce it last week, and emailed me confused because half of it no longer matched what I actually run. Fair. Stacks rot quietly. So here's the mid-2026 state of mine: what's still earning its place on disk, what I deleted, and where I quietly went back to the cloud. Context for the numbers and opinions below: I do smart contract security work, I run everything on WSL2 on a machine with a modest GPU, and I've been doing the local-model thing daily for over a year, not as a hobby but as part of shipping. Still here: Ollama as the runtime Ollama remains the center of the local stack and honestly it's not close. I've tried the alternatives, llama.cpp directly for control, a couple of the newer serving layers for speed, and I keep coming back for one boring reason: the API is stable and everything I've built talks to it. My audit tooling, my shell scripts, my editor config, they all point at localhost:11434 and they've pointed there for a year without breaking. That stability matters more than a marginal tokens-per-second win. When a model update lands, ollama pull and I'm done. The day something meaningfully better appears with the same API shape, I'll switch in an afternoon, which is exactly the position you want to be in. Still here: qwen2.5-coder, both sizes, different jobs I run two models and the split has stayed remarkably stable: qwen2.5-coder:1.5b is the reflex model. It handles anything where speed matters more than depth: quick "what does this diff do" summaries, commit message drafts, pre-filtering files before a heavier pass, and the small classification jobs inside my pipelines ("does this file handle user input, yes or no"). It's fast enough on my machine that I never think about invoking it, and that's the whole point. A model you hesitate to call is a model you stop calling. qwen2.5-coder:7b is the thinking model. Code review, security triage, structured findings extracti