The AI Stack I Actually Run in 2026: A Laptop iGPU and Four Rented Frontiers

The most interesting thing about AI in 2026 is not which frontier model is winning this month. It is that the frontier became a commodity. GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, GLM-5.1, MiniMax-M3 - these are things I rent through clients and gateways that make switching providers close to a base-URL change. They are very good and almost none of the craft of using them lives in choosing between them. The part with actual craft in it moved somewhere less glamorous: onto the integrated GPU in my laptop. That is the part of my setup people ask about, and it is the part worth writing down, so this post is built around it. I treat models the way I treat storage. You do not buy one tier for everything. Hot data goes on NVMe, cold data on spinning rust, the archive on something cheaper still, and the skill is in the tiering, not in worshipping any single disk. My AI stack is tiered the same way: a local tier on the laptop for the constant, private, low-stakes work, a frontier tier I rent for the hard…