// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Local AI Weekly #3: The Token Rug Pull
Welcome to issue #3. I said weekly last time and here we are, one week later. Small victories.
This issue has a theme, and it's money. I guess I am not the only one who thinks that the generous Claude and Codex subscriptions people are enjoying right now are just to get you addicted to using AI.
And it's quite evident, isn't it? A big credit giveaway comes first. Then the models quietly get dumber. Then your credits start burning faster than they used to. Then the price goes up or the offer just ends.
If you've rebuilt your workflow, or worse, your company, on top of this "generosity", you may find yourself in a tough spot when the token price starts going up. The $20/$200,$2000 a month pricing you're planning today, won't give you the same thing in long run.
Which is exactly why the local AI is going to go big. Not every task needs a frontier model. A lot of them need a small model, running on hardware you already own, wrapped in a harness tuned to your work.
Before we get into it, thanks to Monid for supporting this edition.
Think of Monid as OpenRouter, but for agent tools. One base URL, one key, and an agent can reach 2,000+ tools across 72+ providers. The connector layer went open source under MIT, and because connectors are declarative, adding your own API is a pull request a coding agent can write for you.
I promised you an Unsloth verdict last issue and I owe you that. But I got distracted by Buzz, an open source communication tool built for agents and humans to work together. I actually liked Buzz. There is smartphone app too and thus staying connected in not an issue. It could replace Discord for team It's FOSS.
Two biggies independently landed on the same idea at alsmot the same time, and it's a good one. Chat is a bad interface for an agent that works while you're asleep.
Cloudflare open sourced agentic-inbox, a self-hosted email client with an AI agent built in, running entirely on Workers (so it is cloud, not your GPU). Incoming mail arrives through Email Routing, each mailbox lives in its own Durable Object with a SQLite database, and attachments go to R2. The agent reads your inbox, searches conversations, and drafts replies that you approve before they send.