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Free field guide

The LLM Inference Field Guide

The reference we wish existed when the pager went off: the numbers, mental models, and checklists for running LLM inference in production. Compact enough to actually read.

  • The numbers that matter — the ~dozen constants every inference engineer should know cold: bytes per KV token, memory bandwidth ceilings, kernel launch overhead, realistic batch-scaling curves.
  • KV cache sizing math — worked examples you can adapt in five minutes, not a research-paper derivation.
  • How to read a GPU profile without lying to yourself — the traps that make slow kernels look fast and idle SMs look busy.
  • A quantization decision tree — when INT8/FP8/AWQ actually pay for themselves, and when they quietly torch your quality.
  • The benchmark checklist — the contamination sources (warm caches, shared GPUs, wrong percentiles) that invalidate most published numbers.

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