Every RAG tutorial I've read makes the same two assumptions: you have a GPU, and you can call a cloud API. For the environments I build for, both assumptions are wrong. I work on health information systems in the public sector. The stack has to run inside institutional infrastructure — no data leaves the network — and the hardware I get is whatever the procurement cycle produced two years ago. In practice that means Windows Server, CPU only, and open-weight models running locally. So I bui...