Local and offline models

Ollama appears in 144 files in this corpus, and behind them are three concrete artefacts rather than an intention.

The offline chat, and the flight it was built for

March 2026: a chat UI plus a FastAPI proxy to a host-native Ollama, with sessions surviving container rebuilds, built on the same sg-layout web component the vault UI uses. The stated requirement is disarmingly specific and it is the reason the thing is any good:

Offline LLM chat during travel (flight on 19 March 2026). Must work completely disconnected from the internet once the Docker image is built and Ollama models are pulled.

A requirement with a date in it produces a different artefact from a requirement with a principle in it. "Must work offline" gets argued about; "the flight is on the 19th" gets built.

Two sg-compute workload specs

Each carries a manifest, a CLI, a service, schemas and tests. There is also a docker/local-claude image: a local model alongside a Claude Code harness.

The specs are not this site's to own. sg-compute.sgit.ai↗ owns the workload specs and their lifecycle. This page links to them for the local-model story and does not duplicate them, in the same way the grounding ladder↗ is stated in three lines and left to the site that owns it.

The through-line

The same /api/chat proxy shape works against a local Ollama and against a remote tunnel, which is why the offline work was never a detour.

That also makes the offline chat the estate's clearest existing example of option (a), the backend proxy↗, on the websites page: a chat UI whose transport is an endpoint you control. It is small, it is real, and it is closer to a website chat pane than anything else that exists here.

Why this matters more for models than for most dependencies

The open-source position in this estate is that you are one SLA away from losing access. For most dependencies that is a slow problem: a library can be forked, a service can be migrated over a quarter. For a hosted model it is not slow and it is not always about outages. A model can be deprecated, re-tuned, re-priced, or restricted by policy, and your outputs change underneath you without anything failing. The provenance thread↗ is what makes that visible: if you logged the generation id and the model, you can at least tell when the ground moved.

A local model is worse at almost everything and it is yours. That is the trade, stated plainly, and this estate has taken both sides of it deliberately: an aggregator for reach↗, local for the case where reach is not available.

← The provider layer↗ Pages that models read →↗

/agents/index.md