Guides

The 2026 coding-model question is no longer "which model is smarter?" — it is "where does the model actually run?" Open-weight models can be useful alternatives to cloud models on everyday coding tasks, but that does not automatically make them the cheaper or better choice. We run both worlds daily: local models on our AI Arena rig (an RTX 5060 Ti with 16 GB of VRAM, served through Ollama) and cloud models in production pipelines. This guide turns that experience into a practical decision framework.

Your prompt is personal data. That is not a lawyer's trick — it is the practical consequence of GDPR's broad definition of personal data, and it changes the local-vs-cloud debate from a hardware hobby into a compliance decision.

It's 7:45 on a Monday in a primary school in Brno. On the table: 24 essays to assess, a science lesson to plan, and an email to parents that has to sound warm rather than worried. The teacher has no IT department and no budget for fancy platforms — yet a carefully chosen AI assistant can quietly take an hour off the evening. This guide explains seven workflows that work in European schools, the GDPR-conscious tools behind them, and the prompts that make them work.