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First Claude Code client for Ollama local models

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Just to clarify the background a bit. This project wasn’t planned as a big standalone release at first. On January 16, Ollama added support for an Anthropic-compatible API, and I was curious how far this could be pushed in practice. I decided to try plugging local Ollama models directly into a Claude Code-style workflow and see if it would actually work end to end.Here is the release note from Ollama that made this possible: https://ollama.com/blog/claudeTechnically, what I do is pretty straightforward:- Detect which local models are available in Ollama.- When internet access is unavailable, the client automatically switches to Ollama-backed local models instead of remote ones.- From the user’s perspective, it is the same Claude Code flow, just backed by local inference.In practice, the best-performing model so far has been qwen3-coder:30b. I also tested glm-4.7-flash, which was released very recently, but it struggles with reliably following tool-calling instructions, so it is not usable for this workflow yet.

HN · launched Jan 22, 2026 · 44 upvotes (top 23%) · 0 views

Niche: local ai model runners and clients · 110 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -57% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • AI-native
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes Connecting an agent CLI to Ollama is a straightforward proxy or shim mapping Anthropic's Messages API requests and tool-calling format to Ollama's local endpoints.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: llama.cpp, litellm, claude-code-mux, Cline, OpenRouter

Concerns raised: Local models hallucinate more, causing debugging time that exceeds API costs, Hardware savings are a mirage for coding workflows, Too complicated for users to set up and configure, Small market comprehension for the value proposition, Tiny context windows when fitting models into VRAM constraints

Feature requests: Simple sed-like proxy tool with JSON mapping for API translation, Better docs/guide on llama-server flags and configuration for Claude Code, Pre/post processing hooks for API request/response transformation, Improved routing between different models within one session

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 354 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #107 of 355 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 77 days after the earliest competitor.

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