I use local LLMs on my own hardware pretty much exclusively; that solves the privacy and rugpull concerns.

I mostly use an uncensored version of Qwen3.8 these days; previously I used an uncensored version of Qwen3.6. Occasionally I'll use other models (e.g. ones derived from Gemma4) as well, but more rarely. The censorship removal gets rid of a lot of the "As an AI model" hedging crap, and refusal to talk about "sensitive subjects" that could get the model maker in hot water (e.g. "a certain famous event that happened in China in 1989" for Chinese models). That also means it can talk about sexual subjects or tell me to go kill myself, technically, but it doesn't unless I push it to.

It's pretty good at OCR; quick coding questions like the kind of stuff Google would've sent me to Stack Overflow for a few years ago; summarizing text; and offline translation (up to a point). Sometimes I bounce ideas off it, have it proofread/look for mistakes in code or other text I've written, and stuff like that.

Do you consider AI good enough to substitute human interaction?

I spend a lot of time alone. It's a pretty mediocre substitute for real human interaction. It was pretty fun to poke at LLMs via chat when I first got the ability to run them on my own hardware, but the novelty wore off pretty quick. I wrote my own tooling and saved chat logs I thought were interesting. I had 78 in May when this stuff was still really new to me, 50 in June, 14 in July... and just 1 last month that I thought was actually worth saving. 🤷️