Local-first: a Model on Your Own Machine, Zero Cloud

This is the concrete, runnable walkthrough for Post 1 of the Portway series. The goal: stand up a single model behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint on hardware you already own, call it from the official OpenAI SDK, and internalize the stateless contract. Everything here runs locally for $0.

What this post covers

• A demo.py script with two blocks:
  1. Round-trip — one chat call via the OpenAI SDK, printing the content and the usage object.
  2. Stateless proof — the same final question sent as a 1-turn message and as the last turn of a 5-turn fabricated history; both prompt_tokens values are printed alongside an explanation of the delta.

Engine choice on this machine

Apple Silicon Mac, 48 GB unified memory, Ollama already installed. The demo uses Ollama's OpenAI-compatible endpoint at http://localhost:11434/v1 and the gpt-oss:20b model (~14 GB).

The wider Portway series uses llama.cpp on Mac (Ollama is called out as problematic for Qwen3.5 in Post 2). For Post 1 — one model, prove the contract — Ollama is fine and already on the box.

Model options by available RAM

The demo script works with any Ollama-served model — just substitute the model name in demo.py. The table below covers machines from 9 GB unified memory upward.

Model	Pull command	Approx size	Min RAM	Notes
llama3.2:3b	ollama pull llama3.2:3b	~2 GB	8 GB	Fastest; good for testing the contract
gemma3:4b	ollama pull gemma3:4b	~3 GB	8 GB	Google; solid instruction-following
mistral:7b	ollama pull mistral:7b	~4.1 GB	8 GB	Classic 7B baseline
llama3.1:8b	ollama pull llama3.1:8b	~4.7 GB	9 GB	Best quality under 10 GB
qwen2.5:7b	ollama pull qwen2.5:7b	~4.4 GB	9 GB	Strong at instruction + reasoning
gpt-oss:20b	ollama pull gpt-oss:20b	~14 GB	24 GB	Used in this post's sample output

On a 9 GB machine, replace gpt-oss:20b in demo.py with llama3.1:8b or qwen2.5:7b — the contract demonstration is identical.

Prerequisites

• Ollama running locally (curl -s http://localhost:11434/api/tags should return JSON)
• uv installed (uv --version)
• The model pulled. This post uses gpt-oss:20b (requires ~24 GB RAM); see Model options by available RAM for lighter alternatives on 9 GB+ machines.

ollama pull llama3.2:3b

Run it

From the repo root:

uv sync                                  # creates .venv at root, installs deps
uv run --project 1-local-first python 1-local-first/demo.py

Sample output

A real run on this machine (M4-class Mac, 48 GB, gpt-oss:20b via Ollama). Numbers will differ with smaller models — prompt_tokens for the same input stays deterministic regardless of model:

============================================================
Block 1 — round-trip via OpenAI SDK against localhost
============================================================
content: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal.
usage:   CompletionUsage(completion_tokens=43, prompt_tokens=72, total_tokens=115, ...)

============================================================
Block 2 — same final question, 1-turn vs 5-turn history
============================================================
1-turn response: The capital of Canada is **Ottawa**.
5-turn response: The capital of Canada is **Ottawa**, located in the province of Ontario.

1-turn prompt_tokens: 75
5-turn prompt_tokens: 139
delta:                64

Why the delta exists: the server holds NO conversation state between
requests. The 5-turn call's prompt_tokens is higher only because the
client re-sent the full history in the request body. Each call is
evaluated from scratch — history is the client's responsibility.

completion_tokens and the response text will vary run-to-run (sampling is non-deterministic at default temperature). prompt_tokens for the same input is deterministic — 75 and 139 should reproduce.

Notice how the 5-turn response picks up the road-trip context ("located in the province of Ontario") while the 1-turn answer riffs on the bare "Driving." in its prompt — same model, different framing in the client-supplied messages.

The stateless contract, explained

This is the most important concept in the series. Every request to an LLM API — local or cloud — is evaluated from scratch. The server has no memory of previous turns. When you send a multi-turn conversation, you are the one re-sending the full history in the request body. The model sees it all at once.

The server's only "memory" between requests is the prefix cache (a compute optimisation that avoids re-evaluating tokens it has seen before), never conversation state. The cache is invisible to you — from the API contract's perspective, each call is stateless.

Understanding this is the foundation for everything that follows in the series:

• Why conversation management belongs in the client, not the server
• Why context windows matter for cost and latency
• Why streaming usage requires an explicit opt-in (stream_options.include_usage)

Definition of done

• OpenAI SDK round-trips against localhost — Block 1 prints a real content and a usage object.
• Can explain why 5 turns vs 1 turn changes prompt_tokens while the server remembers nothing — Block 2 prints both numbers and the one-paragraph explanation.

Things worth noting now

Context size eats RAM/VRAM. Ollama's default context window is conservative for most models; raising it (e.g. ollama run llama3.2:3b → /set parameter num_ctx 32768) costs unified memory. It was not changed for this post.

gpt-oss emits a reasoning channel (Harmony format). The engine applies the template; you still get a normal message.content. The reasoning channel will be segregated at the gateway in Post 3.

No streaming yet. Post 5 covers the streaming usage trap — you must opt in via stream_options.include_usage, otherwise usage is null in streamed responses.

What's next

Post 2 moves from a single model to running multiple models simultaneously and routing requests between them — the first step toward a real local gateway.

The full series and all demo code live in the Portway repository.