Honestly your best bet is to buy a $20 Claude subscription, ask Claude to set it all up with Pi and llama.cpp and come back in 20 minutes after a cup of coffee. This is also a good idea because it will help set expectations of what a local model can do vs. a frontier model.

This is what I did after struggling to get llama.cpp working at a decent speed on my M1 Macbook. The secret is to very specific with your needs and targeted in what you are using llama.cpp for. Mine setup is just about strictly for qwen3-coder and now, I get a fairly decent speed out of it. I also installed Cursor to check Claude and it all worked out well.