Building a Fully Local, Privacy-First AI Chat with Ollama and Open WebUI

Wed, 14 May 2025 05:14:13 -0500

Sometimes I want full control, not most, but total, end-to-end control over the tools I use to think, build, and create.

That’s where Ollama and Open WebUI comes in. This is my go-to local AI chat setup: a fully local, OpenAI-style interface that runs quietly on your machine without whispering a word to the cloud.

What I Use This For

This isn’t just an academic exercise in privacy. I use this:

When Pragmatism Meets Silence

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 03:35:16 -0500

Had one of those surreal conversations at work recently.

I needed to onboard with an internal AI service—because, frankly, there’s only one option available: and it’s run by a team building their own wrapper around Azure OpenAI.

From the start, it was a mess.

Their onboarding SharePoint was broken, documentation was a year out of date, and the API FAQ pointed to a “Coming Soon w/ RAG API FAQ” page hiding the currently available API docs. I posted in their support space about the issues and was redirected to another team to get help with their onboarding documentation.

Open WebUI on Coderrob

Building a Fully Local, Privacy-First AI Chat with Ollama and Open WebUI

What I Use This For

When Pragmatism Meets Silence