What is Ollama and how does it enable local AI coding?

Ollama is an open-source tool that lets you download and run LLMs locally on your Mac, Linux, or Windows machine. Once installed, it serves a local API (compatible with OpenAI's API format) that AI coding tools like Continue.dev, Cursor, or Open WebUI can connect to. This means your code never leaves your machine — all inference happens on your CPU or GPU.