Atelier

Atelier is a Wails + Go desktop harness for local AI work through Ollama.

The first slice focuses on the gap in Ollama Desktop: image-generation models can be driven directly through the Ollama API while the app also supports streamed chat and multimodal image input.

Current Capabilities

• Connects to a configurable Ollama endpoint, defaulting to http://localhost:11434.
• Reads local models from /api/tags.
• Streams chat from /api/chat into the UI through Wails runtime events.
• Sends base64 image attachments for vision-capable chat models.
• Calls /api/generate for experimental image generation with width, height, and steps.
• Exposes image generation to chat as a generate_image tool (registered only when an image model is configured); the tool model plans and executes the image call when needed, so the decision is made by reasoning rather than keyword matching.
• Chat-model-first turns: the chat model answers directly when no workspace evidence is needed; the tool model plans and executes tools only when the chat model's triage (or an explicitly named skill) asks for them.
• Normalizes generated base64 image responses into browser-renderable image data URLs.
• Stores image-generation conversations and generated artifacts under ~/.atelier/history.
• Sends an explicit num_ctx (configurable, default 8192) on every model call and trims the oldest conversation history to fit the context window instead of letting Ollama truncate silently.

Development

wails dev

Wails will run the Vite frontend and the Go desktop backend together. In browser development mode, Wails exposes a dev server at http://localhost:34115.

Verification

go test ./...
npm run build --prefix frontend
wails build

The packaged macOS app is produced at:

build/bin/Atelier.app

Ollama Models

Recommended local starting points:

• Chat: gpt-oss:20b, mistral-small3.1:latest, or another general model.
• Vision input: llava:7b or another multimodal model.
• Image generation: x/z-image-turbo:latest or x/flux2-klein:4b.

Configuration

Atelier stores local preferences in:

~/.atelier/config.json

The file is versioned and hierarchical so more providers, model profiles, generation defaults, and UI preferences can be added without flattening the schema. The models.tools key names the model that plans and executes tools.

{
  "version": 1,
  "storage": {
    "root": "~/.atelier",
    "history": "~/.atelier/history",
    "artifacts": "~/.atelier/history"
  },
  "providers": {
    "ollama": {
      "baseURL": "http://localhost:11434",
      "models": {
        "chat": "mistral-small3.1:latest",
        "tools": "mistral-small3.1:latest",
        "image": "x/z-image-turbo:latest"
      },
      "numCtx": 8192
    }
  },
  "prompts": {
    "system": "You are Atelier, a precise local AI collaborator."
  },
  "generation": {
    "image": {
      "width": 768,
      "height": 768,
      "steps": 24
    }
  },
  "ui": {
    "mode": "chat"
  }
}

On startup, Atelier creates the storage root and history scaffold:

~/.atelier/
  config.json
  history/
    conversations/
    indexes/

Image generations are stored as conversation folders with conversation.json, turn JSON files, and generated image artifacts.