Part 2 Core skills: Building your first AI chatbot
Part 1 only installed Ollama and prepared your machine. It did not teach you how to build anything with it. This part of the book is where that changes, and where you start writing actual code.
Many beginners can open a terminal and run a model, but they stop there and never learn to build software around it. The eight chapters in this part take you past that point. Chapter 4 walks you through your first real conversation with a model and shows you how to manage the models you download. Chapter 5 sets up VS Code so you have a real place to write, run, and debug your code. Chapter 6 covers virtual environments and pip, the plumbing that keeps your Python projects from breaking each other.
The second half of this part focuses on the bare minimum you need to write software around a local model, rather than on every feature Ollama offers. Chapter 7 introduces the Ollama Python API, including how to send messages, stream responses back to the user, and keep a running conversation history. Chapter 8 introduces Streamlit, which takes that same Python code and turns it into a chatbot you can open and use in a browser.