Local models got good this year. Gemma 4's 12B runs agentic workloads in 16GB of RAM, GLM-5.2 tops the open-weight leaderboards under a permissive license, Qwen 3.6 does tool-calling that would've been frontier-only eighteen months ago. The "just run it locally" argument hit the top of Hacker News, and for once it wasn't cope — a model on your own hardware finally handles real work. So teams are moving agents on-prem, and the pitch is almost always the same: local means private, private mean...