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Notes from the bench

Essays and breakdowns on building products, design, AI orchestration, and everything in between. Sometimes polished, sometimes a work-in-progress.

Why I default to local models for bulk work

AI · Building · Thoughts

Why I default to local models for bulk work

Cloud APIs are great for deep reasoning. For everything else, a model on my own machine does the job for free.

· 1 min read
The bottom-up edit rule

AI · Building · Process

The bottom-up edit rule

When a model queues five edits against one file, working top-down is a bug. Here's the order that fixed it.

· 4 min read
The 12,000-token message I didn't know I was sending

AI · Building · Process

The 12,000-token message I didn't know I was sending

My agent's context window kept jumping from 22% to 60% in a single turn. The leak wasn't where I was looking.

· 3 min read
How I'd set up LM Studio today

AI · Building · Notes

How I'd set up LM Studio today

A recent Llama.cpp update pushed me from 60 tokens per second to 80-plus on the same machine. Here's what I'd run and what I'd turn on.

· 3 min read