> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.pmbai.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Ollama & offline LLM

> PMB works fully offline without any LLM. Ollama is only for the few opt-in background commands.

PMB needs **no LLM** for its core: recall, writes, and the read hook are all
model-free. An LLM is only used by a few opt-in, off-the-hot-path commands
(`consolidate`, `reflect`, `distill`, the `llm:*` graph extractor). For those,
Ollama keeps everything local.

## Set it up

```bash theme={null}
pmb ollama status          # health check + installed models
pmb ollama use balanced    # pick a profile: tiny / balanced / quality
pmb ollama test            # smoke-test the local model
```

## Use it for the optional LLM passes

```bash theme={null}
pmb config set consolidate.backend ollama
pmb consolidate            # cluster memories, extract one rule per cluster - local
```

Backends resolve `auto` as Claude CLI → Anthropic → Ollama. Pin Ollama
explicitly to stay fully offline.

<Note>
  The graph extractor can also run on Ollama for a cleaner knowledge graph:
  `pmb config set graph.extractor llm:ollama`. It never blocks the write path -
  on timeout it falls back to the regex extractor for that one event.
</Note>