Moving WeOutside246 from GPT-5 to local models on a base M4 Mac Mini

So, I've been spending a lot of time recently trying to answer a question that I think a lot of indie AI builders are going to hit sooner rather than later: Can I stop renting intelligence from a hyperscaler and just run the thing myself? In my case the project is WeOutside246 , an autonomous agent I built to track the pulse of Barbados. It follows more than 900 Instagram accounts, reads thousands of posts, looks at images, and tries to work out whether something is an upcoming event on the island or just noise. And by noise I mean all the things that look a bit event-ish but are not actually useful for an events listing site: recaps, giveaway posts, sports fixtures, lifestyle shots, throwbacks, posts from other islands, and so on. This is very much not a toy problem. The small things matter here. A model that confuses a recap from last weekend with a fete happening next Friday is not just slightly wrong. It makes the site worse. So this post is a technical write-up of what I did, what