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

Maybe useful as a starting point: llama.cpp on B200, keeping consumer GPUs in mind from the start.

Feel free to tear it apart if you see something dumb.

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

Two paths both seem viable, but they break down differently once prefill/decode split becomes important.

Interested in tradeoffs more than fan loyalty.

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 structured output becomes important.

What would you pick if you had to live with it for a few months? Turns out 'just one more test' was a lie.

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 KV cache pressure.

Wondering if this is just where the whole space is heading now.

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 KV cache pressure decides everything downstream.

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

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

If I had to summarize the lesson so far, it would be that clean setup and observability beat clever guesses.

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

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

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

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: DeepSeek, SGLang, 5090, with a lot of attention on structured output.

Maybe useful as a starting point for newer folks. At this point the real bottleneck is my patience.

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.

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

Wanted to compare notes with people doing similar things.

My current setup is MLX with Threadripper box, and I keep running into MoE serving.

Would appreciate practical advice rather than theory.

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.

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.