What problem does it solve?
Writing code against a local Ollama daemon frequently encounters undocumented footguns including hallucinated model names, broken vision payloads, incorrect structured output modes, and misconfigured sampling parameters that cause empty responses, wasted GPU resources, and unpredictable inference behavior.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Discovery-first model selection: Automatically verify installed models via the
/api/tags endpoint to avoid referencing uninstalled or incorrectly named models.
- Safe default guidance: Preset recommended values for sampling parameters, structured output modes, thinking model configuration, and vision payload formatting to prevent common runtime failures.
- Verified bug workarounds: Documented fixes for production-verified Ollama vision pipeline bugs that cause empty responses when using legacy JSON format or positive
num_predict values with image inputs.
- Use Case: Build a local image captioning pipeline that reliably returns captions without empty responses, or set up reproducible structured output for local LLM evaluation and benchmarking tasks.
Quick Start
Use the ollama skill to write a Python script that safely queries a local Ollama vision model to describe an image, using the correct payload format to avoid empty responses.