David,
Billy showed off his "local" LLM setup sometime ago. It was sort of in the back of my brain. A few days ago I've read on it, downloaded and briefly tested. While it is slower to respond, it produced viable answers, even on intricate questions. There are many free models. Some tailored for "reasoning" some for "coding". I am taking care of a friend, who needs a lot of attention, so not much time to play with these toys right now, but I definitely want to experiment with this FX plugin.