This document is the updated setup for a high-performance, local AI development environment on an M4 Max (36GB RAM). It replaces the Ollama backend with llama-server (upstream llama.cpp), delivering a 2.4x speedup on the fast-coder slot and 1.9x on the think-brain slot, with correct model templating and full control over every flag.
What changed from v1: Ollama is gone as the inference backend. llama-swap stays as the proxy but now talks directly to llama-server instead of spawning Ollama processes. Every flag you set now actually applies.