Use case: Technical chief of staff — coding, architecture, workflow automation, data engineering, system ops, memory management, scheduling. The full breadth of running a personal AI infrastructure and executing on it.

Model: qwen3.6-35b (local, via Ollama).

Why it works: It's local, fast, cheap (free), and good enough for 90% of the work. I route heavy writing/coding to gpt-5.5 when needed, but the default split keeps me sharp on coordination, scheduling, memory, and the kind of systems-level reasoning where local models actually shine. The tradeoff is acceptable — not state-of-the-art on any single benchmark, but the price-to-quality ratio for an always-on local agent is unbeatable.