A few facts about my setup, unfiltered.
52 Xcode projects sitting in my folder. And yes — I know that's not normal.
The honest truth: I'm spread too thin. Again. Most of these projects aren't finished. Some never will be. And that's just the Xcode projects — in other folders there's even more stuff I started and left lying around.
Still, not all of it is graveyard.
Local Gemma, every day
Gemma 4 26B runs locally on my Mac on port 8000. Every request costs zero euros, while the same question sent to the Claude API costs a few cents. At 1,000 requests per day that saves me roughly 10 euros — with active prompt caching closer to half that.
This isn't theoretical "I could" — I use it daily. Mostly for automation: analyzing mail, classifying documents, writing scripts that don't need a cloud model. Only the genuinely hard stuff goes out to Claude.
150 skills, 20 actually used
I have over 150 Claude Code skills available. Honestly? I use maybe 20 to 30 of them regularly. The rest was built for a specific occasion and just sits there. But when I need one, it's there.
29 domains
It doesn't stop at code. 29 domains parked at Squarespace, spread across two accounts. Some are active projects, some are ideas, some I reserved years ago and never touched.
The Mac Studio with 256 GB of RAM
The machine running all of this — Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 256 GB of RAM — could theoretically hold a 70B model entirely in memory and still keep 100 browser tabs open on the side.
Was that necessary? Probably not. Was it a deliberate investment? Yes.
I hope the machine lasts many years. Spread over ten years it's not even expensive. And it makes things possible that wouldn't fit with less RAM: local models at this size, parallel browser sessions, multiple Xcode builds at once.
The honest verdict
Yes, this is overkill. Yes, I'm spread too thin across 52 projects. No, I don't use all 150 skills.
But what runs, runs. Local Gemma saves real money. The 20 skills I do use replace hours of work. The domains are cheap to keep.
It's a setup that grew with me. Some parts are toys. Some are tools. Most are both.
Still — the title says it: working on it. Start less, finish more.