Curious what people here are seeing.

I'm trying to decide whether to keep the current stack or change course. Main question is how people here are handling small local stacks.

Not looking for the perfect answer, mostly what worked in real use.

Posting this in case it saves someone else a little time.

I'm helping a small team set up a local workflow. We don't need a giant stack, but we do care about token cost.

I'm especially interested in mistakes worth avoiding.

This keeps coming up in conversation so I figured I'd start a thread.

It feels like the conversation has shifted hard toward inference and serving details lately, and honestly that makes sense once you start dealing with INT4.

Maybe obvious to some of you, but it clicked for me this week.

For context, I'm not chasing leaderboard numbers. I mostly want the system to feel consistent day to day.

Did a bit of testing and thought I'd post the result here.

I tried this with Kimi using SGLang on Threadripper box. The headline result was better than I expected, but embeddings still ended up being the limiting factor.

Curious if anyone else landed in the same place.

For context, I'm not chasing leaderboard numbers. I mostly want the system to feel consistent day to day.

Spent some time on this today and wanted to compare notes.

I'm comparing two approaches here: keep it simple on 5090, or squeeze more out of the stack and deal with the complexity.

Trying to avoid rebuilding the whole thing twice.

My use case is pretty ordinary: local chat, some document work, and occasional batch jobs.

Did a bit of testing and thought I'd post the result here.

Short version: MLX behaved well for me, but only after I stopped ignoring quant drift.

Curious if anyone else landed in the same place.

Thought I'd post a small recipe because a lot of threads ask similar things.

This isn't revolutionary, but the combination of Ollama and mini PC felt surprisingly usable once I tuned around consumer GPUs.

If someone wants the exact settings I can clean them up and post them.

For context, I'm not chasing leaderboard numbers. I mostly want the system to feel consistent day to day.

Spent some time on this today and wanted to compare notes.

Two paths both seem viable, but they break down differently once token cost becomes important.

What would you pick if you had to live with it for a few months?

This keeps coming up in conversation so I figured I'd start a thread.

One thing I keep noticing is that people underestimate workstation thermals until they actually try to run this stuff for more than one afternoon.

Curious whether that lines up with what other people are seeing.

Posting this in case it saves someone else a little time.

If you were starting from scratch today for this use case, what would you choose first and what would you ignore?

Would rather learn from your scars than collect my own all at once.