Teaming up Ollama, gpt-oss and Zed to create a fully local code assistant

Feb 3, 2026 by Thibault Debatty | 74 views

https://cylab.be/blog/472/teaming-up-ollama-gpt-oss-and-zed-to-create-a-fully-local-code-assistant

As developers, we’re constantly looking for ways to boost our productivity and efficiency. One of the most exciting advancements in recent years is the emergence of AI-powered coding assistants. In this post, we’ll explore a powerful trio of tools that can revolutionize the way you write code, while keeping your code and data fully local: Ollama, gpt-oss, and Zed.

Install Ollama

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

https://cylab.be/blog/377/run-your-own-local-llm-with-ollama

Download gpt-oss

gpt-oss is OpenAI’s first open-source language model release since GPT-2, featuring two models: gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. It is designed to implement reasoning, agentic tasks, code assistants etc.

The models are post-trained with quantization such that most weights can be reduced to 4 bits per parameter. As a result the 20b version of the model weights roughly 14GB and is able to run on systems with as little as 16GB memory, while delivering performance comparable to OpenAI’s o3-mini.

ollama pull gpt-oss:20b

⚡ Tricks

You can list running models with

ollama ps

And you can stop a model (to free GPU vRAM) with

ollama stop <model>

# e.g.
ollama stop gpt-oss:20b

Install Zed

Zed is an IDE that was specifically developed to be light and fast, and to interact nicely with LLM and coding assistants.

You can install it with:

curl -f https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh

Once installed:

open a code project (or create a new one)
click the ⭐ at the bottom right to open the AI panel
click on ‘Choose a model’, normally Ollama should be automatically detected and gpt-oss should appear in the list
start interacting with your code assistant

Until now I have successfully used the team Ollama, gpt-oss and zed to speed up tasks like:

create models and database migrations
write documentation
create views with HTML, CSS and/or javascript
write tests

⚡ Using Ollama on a remote device

Even though there is a config field called api_url in Zed’s configuration, Zed requires Ollama to be running locally to use it. This change was introduced in a recent update, and there is apparently no plan to revert this change.

To work around this, you can use SSH port forwarding to make a remote Ollama instance appear local:

ssh -L 11434:localhost:11434 user@remote-host

to forward the local Ollama port (11434) to the remote machine.

This blog post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0