Field Guide: Running Gemma 4 Locally

Local LLMs have quietly crossed an important threshold. With the release of Gemma 4, you can now run a capable reasoning model locally —fast enough, cheap enough, and simple enough to actually use in production workflows. Step 0 — Install llama.cpp llama.cpp now uses CMake , so older make commands will fail. Mac (fastest path) brew install llama.cpp Mac / Linux (recommended, latest version) git…