Model Showdown Round 3: Ditching Ollama in Favor of llama.cpp

In Round 1 , we ran five local models and two cloud models through a single coding task. The local models held their own. In Round 2 , we added Gemma 4 and Kimi K2, fixed our scoring methodology, and watched Gemma climb to the top. But something kept nagging at us. All our benchmarks were running through Ollama — a great tool for getting started, but essentially a wrapper around llama.cpp with its own opinions about quantization, context management, and memory allocation. We were benchmarking Ol