Best Ollama Models to Drive Claude Code Without Anthropic's API
Which Ollama models work as a local backend for Claude Code's CLI, what features degrade without Anthropic's API, and how to wire it up.
Tag
#local-ai
Best Local AI for Sensitive Personal Data (Taxes, Medical)
Self-hosted and hosted AI assistants that keep tax, medical, and financial data private, plus what to check in any privacy-first AI chat setup.
Why AI Models Need a GPU: A Beginner Explainer (October 2026)
A plain-language walk through parallelism, matrix multiplication, VRAM, memory bandwidth, and why a CPU can run an LLM but rarely fast enough.
Surface Laptop Ultra and RTX Spark: Can It Run Local AI
Microsoft's first laptop on Nvidia's RTX Spark has a price and ship date. Here is what fits in 128GB of unified memory - and what it costs you.
Best Local LLM for Cover Letters and Resumes
Practical tier guide to running a local LLM for cover letters, resumes, and CV drafts. Picks by RAM, instruction following, and what to keep offline.
Best Local LLM for Multilingual Use (October 2026)
Which open-weight model actually handles non-English work, what each provider claims about language coverage, and the tradeoffs between breadth and depth.
Abliterated Models Can Hide Weekend-Built Backdoors
A $50 weekend-built backdoor in a fine-tuned Qwen model shows that any edited open-weight model, abliterated builds included, can carry one.
AI Chats That Accept Image Uploads Without Training on Them
Which AI chats accept image uploads without training on your photos, what they retain, and the local fallback.
Best Local Vision Models by VRAM (October 2026)
Open-weight vision-language models sized by VRAM: Qwen3-VL 2B to 235B-A22B, Mistral Small 3.2, Gemma 3, Pixtral, and where each tier breaks.
Best Local LLM for Spreadsheet Analysis on a Laptop
Practical tier guide to running a local LLM on Excel, CSV, and tabular data. Picks by RAM, JSON output for clean rows, and what to skip.
Self-Host a Private AI Home Server: A Primer (October 2026)
How to pick the hardware, OS, and runtime for a 24/7 local AI server, from a low-power mini PC to a used 3090 workstation, and what each costs to run.
Best Local AI for Creative Writing: Private Drafts
Run an LLM against your novel without sending an unpublished manuscript to a vendor. Models, front ends, and what the tradeoffs are.
Best Local Video Generation Models by VRAM Tier (October 2026)
Open video models sized for real GPUs, with the text encoder counted in and the licence checked. Wan, Hunyuan, LTX-Video, CogVideoX, Mochi and Allegro compared.
What's New in Ollama 0.40, and Should You Upgrade?
v0.40.0-rc0 ships MLX-by-default on Apple Silicon, v0.35 adds decision models, transformers runs llama.cpp quants. What changed and how to upgrade.
Best Local AI for Email: Triage, Draft, Reply Privately
Run an AI assistant against your inbox without sending mail to Google, Microsoft, or any third party. RAG setup and tradeoffs.
Decision Models: Ollama and OpenAI Ship Jev APIs in 24 Hours
Ollama 0.35 adds Jev-style decision models locally the same day OpenAI previews its Decisions API for Luna. Same primitive, two stacks.
Self-Host ComfyUI for Image Generation (October 2026)
Install ComfyUI on a consumer GPU and run SD 1.5, SDXL, and FLUX locally. What fits your VRAM, where the models go, and what changed in 2026.
Best Local LLM for Long-Document Q&A: How to Chat with a Book
Which local LLM should you use to ask questions about a 500-page PDF without uploading it? A practical guide by context window and hardware tier.
MoE vs Dense Models for Local AI (September 2026)
What the 'A3B' and 'A22B' suffixes mean, when Mixture-of-Experts beats a dense model on your hardware, and how to read a model card to tell which is which.
Best Local Models by Context Window (October 2026)
Local LLMs ranked by maximum context length: 32K, 128K, 256K, and 1M+ tiers, with the model that fits each tier and the VRAM each one needs.
Frontier LLM API Prices After the September 2026 Price War
Cost-per-token comparison of Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and Grok 4.7 after the September 2026 price war, plus where local inference wins.
Best Local LLM for Everyday Tasks (Chat, Writing, Summarizing)
Which open-weight LLM should you actually run for everyday chat, writing, and summarizing? A tier-by-tier guide from 8 GB laptops to 32 GB desktops.
Rent a GPU for Local AI Workloads (September 2026)
Four cloud GPU vendors compared for self-hosted LLM inference: real per-hour rates for RTX 4090, A100, and H100, plus where renting beats owning hardware.
Local AI Inference Speed: What to Expect (September 2026)
Real tokens per second from local LLMs on consumer hardware: how quant and context change speed, why memory bandwidth is the limit, and what helps.