Build a Socratic Study Buddy with Gemma 4: A Beginner’s Guide to Running AI Locally

A beginner-friendly guide to building a Socratic Study Buddy using Google's Gemma 4 model running locally via LM Studio with a Streamlit web UI frontend. Covers model size selection (2B to 31B variants), GGUF quantization setup, local server configuration, and using Gemma 4's chain-of-reasoning capability to create a tutor that guides students through problems rather than giving direct answers. Also discusses privacy benefits of local AI, ethical trade-offs, and includes a Mermaid.js diagram generation feature. Full source code is open-source on GitHub.