Quick answer A LoRA only works on the base model it was trained against. An SDXL LoRA will not load onto SD 1.5 or Flux. This is the single most common reason a LoRA "does nothing". You never have to guess which base it needs. Every LoRA on Hugging Face declares a base_model field in its metadata — check it before you download. Strength is a dial, not a switch. A scale … [Read more...] about Stable Diffusion LoRA: Matching the Base Model, Weights and Stacking
Local AI & Tech Guides
Practical guides to running AI on your own hardware. We cover local LLMs end to end — how much RAM and VRAM you actually need, which runner to use, how quantization changes the maths, and which GPUs, Macs and handhelds are worth buying. Every speed figure here is a clearly labelled estimate, never a lab claim.
Pair these guides with our free AI tools: the VRAM calculator, the hardware matrix and the model directory.
Stable Diffusion Image Editors in 2026: Which Ones Are Still Maintained
Quick answer 🔴 The two interfaces most tutorials still recommend have stopped. AUTOMATIC1111 last released v1.10.1 in February 2025 and has made zero commits in 90 days. Forge last released in February 2024 and has not been pushed to since July 2025. If you want an actual canvas — brush, selection, layers — there are two serious local options: InvokeAI (Apache-2.0, … [Read more...] about Stable Diffusion Image Editors in 2026: Which Ones Are Still Maintained
ComfyUI Templates in 2026: 660 Built In, and Half Need the Cloud
Quick answer ComfyUI ships 660 workflow templates in the version current at the time of writing — far more than the handful most guides show you. 🔴 368 of them (56%) are cloud API templates. They send your prompt, and often your image, to Google, Grok, MiniMax, Recraft or similar. On a tool people install specifically to run things on their own machine, the majority of … [Read more...] about ComfyUI Templates in 2026: 660 Built In, and Half Need the Cloud
Flux LoRA in 2026: Which Base Model You Can Legally Train On
Quick answer A Flux LoRA is a “Derivative” under Black Forest Labs’ licence, and the licence says so in as many words: a Derivative includes any “customized or fine-tuned version” of the model. Train on a [dev] model and the LoRA inherits the non-commercial restriction. The images are a separate matter. Outputs are explicitly not Derivatives, and you “may use Output for … [Read more...] about Flux LoRA in 2026: Which Base Model You Can Legally Train On
Best Vector Database for Local RAG in 2026: What It Costs in RAM
Quick answer For a personal RAG corpus the database is not the expensive part. Fifty thousand chunks embedded at 768 dimensions need roughly 188 MiB of RAM once index and overhead are counted — less than the embedding model that produced them. Four different kinds of software get called “a vector database”. Choosing the wrong type costs you far more than … [Read more...] about Best Vector Database for Local RAG in 2026: What It Costs in RAM
Securing a Local LLM: Prompt Injection and the OWASP Top 10
Running a model on your own hardware removes one category of risk — your data stops leaving the building — and people often stop thinking about security there. It does not remove the others. A local model that reads your documents, browses a page or calls a tool has an attack surface, and the most important vulnerability class in it has no known reliable fix. That is not a … [Read more...] about Securing a Local LLM: Prompt Injection and the OWASP Top 10
Stable Diffusion Prompts: What the Documentation Actually Says
Most Stable Diffusion prompt advice is folklore: lists of magic words, copied "quality tags", and parentheses stacked until something changes. Some of it works by accident. This guide covers what the documentation and the model configuration files actually say — including a hard limit on prompt length that nobody mentions, and which is the real reason your carefully written … [Read more...] about Stable Diffusion Prompts: What the Documentation Actually Says
Best Local Text-to-Speech Models in 2026: Sizes, Licences and What Runs Offline
Local text-to-speech has quietly become practical. A usable English voice is now a 63 MB file that runs on a CPU, and the best-sounding open model is 327 MB. The catch is not quality or hardware any more — it is licensing, and one of the most widely used models is non-commercial in a way that is easy to miss, because the licence it points at no longer exists on the web. Quick … [Read more...] about Best Local Text-to-Speech Models in 2026: Sizes, Licences and What Runs Offline
Self-Hosting n8n with Local AI: Setup, Licence and What You May Not Do
n8n is the usual answer when someone wants to wire a local model into real automation — trigger on an email, pull a document, ask the model, write the result somewhere. Self-hosting it is genuinely easy. The part almost every tutorial skips is that n8n is not open source in the sense people assume, and its licence says something specific about what you may do with it. This … [Read more...] about Self-Hosting n8n with Local AI: Setup, Licence and What You May Not Do
Local AI Pair Programming in 2026: Which Tools Are Still Maintained
Search for an AI pair programmer that runs against your own local model and you will be pointed at the same tool almost every time. It has 49,000 stars, it is genuinely good, and it has not shipped a release in more than a year. Nothing on its page says so. This guide checks which terminal and editor AI assistants are actually still being developed, using repository activity … [Read more...] about Local AI Pair Programming in 2026: Which Tools Are Still Maintained