I'm building a desktop AI app for non-technical users — the kind of person who double-clicks an icon and expects search to work, and who will never open a terminal in their life. Under the hood it does local RAG: ingest documents, embed them, retrieve on each question. For a while, the embedding step went through Ollama.
The bug that didn't look like a bug
On my machine everything was fine, because on my machine Ollama is always running. Then I ran the flow a real user would hit — fresh login, Ollama not started — and watched the app quietly fall apart:
/ask returned an answer with no retrieved context.
/search returned nothing at all.
