Local AI with VS Code is the definitive guide for developers, engineers, data scientists, and privacy-conscious creators who want to build intelligent applications without sending a single byte to the cloud. Written by Liora Quillan, this hands-on book shows you how to turn VS Code into a powerful, offline AI development environment using open-source LLMs, privacy-first extensions, and fully local inference engines such as Ollama, Continue, Llama.cpp, GPT4All, and more. With cloud AI platforms becoming increasingly expensive and restrictive, developers are turning to a new generation of local, open-source large language models for coding, automation, debugging, RAG pipelines, and intelligent agent workflows. This book teaches you exactly how to run these models efficiently, privately, and securely — right on your laptop or workstation. You’ll learn step-by-step how to: Install and optimize VS Code for local AI workflows - Run advanced models through Ollama, Continue, and Llama.cpp - Build offline copilots, code assistants, and autonomous developer agents - Implement local RAG, embeddings, vector search, and document Q&A - Use zero-cloud extensions to keep your data 100% private - Create AI-powered automation with Python, Node.js, and shell tools - Develop security-hardened, air-gapped AI pipelines for enterprise or regulated environments - Optimize performance on CPU-only systems (no GPU required) Whether you’re a software engineer, indie hacker, DevOps engineer, ML practitioner, or cybersecurity professional, this book gives you the blueprint to develop private, offline, high-performance AI systems using the tools you already love. No subscriptions. No APIs. No cloud. Your machine, your models, your data.