Vibe Coding in VS Code

30 MIN

Use DGX Spark as a local or remote Vibe Coding assistant with Ollama and Continue

SymptomCauseFix
Ollama not startingGPU drivers may not be installed correctlyRun nvidia-smi in the terminal. If the command fails check DGX Dashboard for updates to your DGX Spark.
Continue can't connect over the networkPort 11434 may not be open or accessibleRun command ss -tuln | grep 11434. If the output does not reflect tcp LISTEN 0 4096 *:11434 *:* , go back to step 2 and run the ufw command.
Continue can't detect a locally running Ollama modelConfiguration not properly set or detectedCheck OLLAMA_HOST and OLLAMA_ORIGINS in /etc/systemd/system/ollama.service.d/override.conf file. If OLLAMA_HOST and OLLAMA_ORIGINS are set correctly, add these lines to your ~/.bashrc file.
High memory usageModel size too bigConfirm no other large models or containers are running with nvidia-smi. Use smaller models such as gpt-oss:20b for lightweight usage.

NOTE

DGX Spark uses a Unified Memory Architecture (UMA), which enables dynamic memory sharing between the GPU and CPU. With many applications still updating to take advantage of UMA, you may encounter memory issues even when within the memory capacity of DGX Spark. If that happens, manually flush the buffer cache with:

sudo sh -c 'sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'