Running Claude Code Locally for Free with Ollama
Claude Code has quickly become a popular AI coding assistant for generation, debugging, and architecture reasoning — but cloud subscriptions and token billing can add up fast. This guide shows how to run Claude Code locally with Ollama, pointing it at open models like Qwen3-Coder at 32B, 7B, or lightweight 3B tiers depending on your hardware. You'll install Claude Code and Ollama on macOS, Linux, or Windows, pull models, configure environment variables to redirect the API to localhost:11434, and understand the trade-offs between cost savings, privacy, and local model quality.