Shittu Olumide Builds 26B Local Coding Stack With Ollama and Claude Code
Updated
Updated · KDnuggets · Jun 10
Shittu Olumide Builds 26B Local Coding Stack With Ollama and Claude Code
1 articles · Updated · KDnuggets · Jun 10
Summary
A new guide lays out a full local agentic programming setup using Ollama, Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 26B MoE and Claude Code, aimed at avoiding per-token API costs, privacy leakage and rate-limit disruptions.
Gemma 4 is the key enabler: the 26B MoE activates 3.8 billion parameters per pass, scores about 79% on τ2-bench tool use and 77.1% on LiveCodeBench v6, versus 6.6% and 29.1% for Gemma 3 27B.
The walkthrough centers on practical fixes that make local agents usable, including overriding Ollama’s default 4K context to 64K, setting Claude Code to localhost:11434, and using a verification script to test health, API calls and tool_use output.
Hardware remains the main constraint: the recommended model needs roughly 16-18 GB VRAM and an 18 GB download, while the article says cloud models still outperform on large-scale architectural reasoning and SWE-bench-style tasks.
The broader pitch is that Apache 2.0-licensed Gemma 4 and Ollama’s Anthropic-compatible API now make a private, zero-per-token coding agent practical for everyday work such as code analysis, test generation, refactoring and debugging.