Chat API

Pico AI Homelab supports the following OpenAI and Ollama-compatible endpoints for chat:

• v1/chat/completions OpenAI-compatible chat API

• api/chat Ollama-compatible chat API

• api/generate Ollama-compatible completion API

These endpoints are conform OpenAI and Ollama. Pico supports message content types text, image_url, and video_url.

Pico supports both LLM and VLM models. To discover which models have been downloaded and are available to clients, use the models API.

Request

POST /v1/chat

POST /api/chat

POST /api/generate

Name	Type	Description
model	String	Name of the embeddings model, e.g. all-MiniLM-L6-v2
messages	Array of messages	String or strings to embed
stream	Optional boolean	If true or nil, the response will be streamed to the client per token
reasoning	Optional enum	See reasoning
chat_template_kwargs	Optional dictionary	See reasoning
max_tokens	Optional integer	Deprecated, use max_completion_tokens instead.
max_completion_tokens	Optional integer	Upper bound for the number of tokens that can be generated for a completion, including visible output tokens and reasoning tokens
temperature	Optional float	What sampling temperature to use
frequency_penalty	Optional float
top_p	Optional float
user	Optional string	Ignored by Pico
format	Optional string	Ignored by Pico
options	Optional object	See Ollama options

Reasoning

The reasoning API is supported in Pico 1.1.14 and later.

Reasoning for reasoning models such as Qwen 3 is enabled by default, and may be disabled by the chat client on a per-conversation basis. Pico supports both OpenAI and vLLM mechanisms to configure reasoning.

Unlike OpenAI, Pico does not implement reasoning levels (low, medium, high); only binary ON or OFF states are supported. Requests specifying low will be interpreted by Pico as Reasoning = Off. Note that Pico also supports non-OpenAI standard values on, off, and none .

Name	Type	Description
effort	Enum	See below
summary	Optional string	This property is ignored

Name	Description
low	Pico interprets this condition as: Reasoning mode disabled
medium	Pico interprets this condition as: Reasoning mode enabled
high	Pico interprets this condition as: Reasoning mode enabled
on	Reasoning mode enabled
off	Reasoning mode disabled
none	Reasoning mode disabled

Alternatively, use the vLLM API by setting key enable_thinking to true or false in chat_template_kwargs