---
name: Route Tier-0 tasks through Ollama (Mike's ClaudeTools design intent)
description: Drafts, summaries, classifications, extractions MUST go through Ollama per Mike's tiered-model architecture. Don't default to Claude inference for low-stakes text generation.
type: feedback
---

Route Tier-0 tasks (summaries, classifications, drafts, extractions) through Ollama. Not optional — this is how Mike designed ClaudeTools to work.

**Why:** Mike built the tiered-model architecture (`CLAUDE.md` Model Routing section + `.claude/OLLAMA.md`) deliberately. Tier 0 is free + fast + private. Defaulting to Claude for every drafting task burns context window and Anthropic tokens on work that qwen3:14b does fine.

**How to apply:**
- Drafting emails, session-log paragraphs, status-update sentences, commit-message first-drafts → qwen3:14b
- Summarizing long output (Graph JSON, PowerShell transcripts, log tails) → qwen3:14b
- Extracting structured data from text → qwen3:14b
- Suggesting refactors / generating docstrings → codestral:22b (then review)
- NEVER for: auth decisions, credential handling, production migrations, security review, citation work, production-change scripts

**Endpoint resolution (updated 2026-04-22 in `.claude/OLLAMA.md`):**
```bash
if curl -s -m 2 http://localhost:11434/api/tags >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    OLLAMA="http://localhost:11434"
else
    OLLAMA="http://100.92.127.64:11434"
fi
```

HOWARD-HOME has the canonical models loaded locally (qwen3:14b, codestral:22b, nomic-embed-text, plus bonus qwen3-coder:30b) — so HOWARD-HOME uses local Ollama, not Mike's. Zero Tailscale hop.

**Call pattern for qwen3 — use `/api/chat` with `think:false`**, NOT `/api/generate`. qwen3 on generate endpoint dumps reasoning into internal thinking tokens and returns empty `response` field. Chat endpoint with `think:false` returns clean content in `message.content`:

```python
body = json.dumps({
  'model':'qwen3:14b',
  'messages':[{'role':'user','content': prompt}],
  'stream':False,
  'think':False
}).encode()
# POST to OLLAMA + '/api/chat'
# Read res['message']['content']
```

Codestral doesn't need `think:false` — just use it on `/api/chat` normally.

Cold-start ~30-50s on first call per model per session; warm calls 1-5s.

**Incident 2026-04-22:** Spent an entire Cascades rollout session (G1 hygiene, orphan cleanup, risk register, synology discovery, etc.) without routing a single task through Ollama despite many drafting opportunities (report drafts, summary text, email drafts). Howard called this out: "just make sure ollama is being used as mike has designed claudetools to work."