How I Built an AI Assistant on a Mac Mini M4

The Setup I run a Mac Mini M4 Pro as a 24/7 AI workstation. It sits on my desk, never sleeps, and runs an AI agent called Caper that handles everything from content creation to code generation to business automation. Here is exactly how I set it up, what it costs, and what it actually does. Hardware Mac Mini M4 Pro — 24GB RAM, 512GB SSD ($599 base, upgraded RAM) External SSD — 2TB for storing projects, logs, and media Always-on internet — Ethernet, not WiFi, for reliability Total hardware cost: ~$800. Runs 24/7 at about $3/month in electricity. The Stack Local LLMs I run Ollama with several models pulled locally: llama3.2 for fast general tasks codellama for code generation mistral for creative writing These run entirely on-device using the M4 Neural Engine. No API costs for local inference. Cloud APIs (When Needed) For heavy lifting, Caper calls: Claude API — Complex reasoning, long documents, code review OpenAI Whisper — Audio transcription Cost: ~$5-15/month depending on usage Pytho