While the service binds to the localhost address at 127.0.0[.]1:11434 by default, it's possible to expose it to the public internet by means of a trivial change: configuring it to bind to 0.0.0[.]0 or a public interface.
One of the really interesting findings was the median date when developers started using AI tools. They found it was April 2024, which corresponds fairly neatly to Claude 3 coming out and Gemini 2.5 coming out. This is really the dawn of the reasoning or thinking models, and around that same time, we got much better at tool-calling. For coding tasks, you really need to be able to leverage external information in order to problem solve,