How to Get Better Results From Local LLMs With Ollama
InfoWorld, Tuesday, September 15th, 2026
Laptop-class models have improved sharply, and this walks through model choice, parameters and runtime tuning in Ollama.
Local models have improved enough to warrant a second look: Posit engineer Simon P. Couch noted that models scoring 0% on his agentic coding eval a few months earlier hit 90% after the Qwen 3.5 and Gemma 4 releases.
They still will not match frontier cloud models, but for defined tasks like answering coding questions, writing functions or summarizing documents they can be surprisingly capable. Ollama is not the fastest option but is among the easiest to set up and is supported out of the box by VS Code, JetBrains AI Assistant, Zed and Posit Assistant, and can launch Claude Code or Codex against a local model.