Guessing local versus remote wastes both battery and tokens. Measure three gates before any prompt leaves disk. Connectivity, secret residue, and wall-clock cost decide the hop. A laptop is a workshop on your desk. A remote model is a mill across town. You do not crate the shop for one cut. House keys do not travel with the lumber. Secrets inside a prompt are those house keys. A free mill still sits far across town. This article is a measurement workflow, not a bake-off. The script belo...