How I Built a Lightweight, Local-First VS Code AI Assistant with Ollama
馃殌 The Motivation Cloud AI coding assistants are convenient, but subscription fees add up and sending enterprise or personal codebases to external APIs isn't ideal for privacy. I wanted a simple, zero-cost, local-first alternative that integrates directly into VS Code and hooks straight into Ollama
Cloud AI coding assistants are convenient, but subscription fees add up and sending enterprise or personal codebases to external APIs isn't ideal for privacy.
I wanted a simple, zero-cost, local-first alternative that integrates directly into VS Code and hooks straight into Ollama. So, I built Echo.
To keep the MVP fast and reliable, the architecture is entirely decoupled from heavy frontend frameworks:
Echo is available as an open-source MVP release on GitHub:
I'd love feedback from fellow developers building local toolchains!