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 small local stacks.

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

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.

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?

I'm especially interested in mistakes worth avoiding.

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've gone back and forth between MLX and llama.cpp for Kimi. The interesting difference for me has been prefill/decode split.

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

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

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

Two paths both seem viable, but they break down differently once continuous batching becomes important.

Interested in tradeoffs more than fan loyalty.

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

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

Interested in tradeoffs more than fan loyalty.

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?

Simple and boring is a valid answer.

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

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

I'm not trying to build a perfect architecture diagram. I just want a sane starting point around SGLang and Threadripper box.

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

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

The more I work with local setups, the more it seems like consumer GPUs decides everything downstream.

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. The logs were somehow calmer than I was.

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

Just sharing a setup that ended up working reasonably well: Llama, MLX, M3 Max, with a lot of attention on small local stacks.

Maybe useful as a starting point for newer folks.

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

After a few runs on 7900 XTX, I ended up with decent performance, but the setup only really made sense once I adjusted around NVFP4.

Curious if anyone else landed in the same place.

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