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The homelab AI platform: the model fleet, loch-nessh, ipsa and the agents, and what broke along the way.
The Cortex Grows Senses: ROCm for LLMs, Multimodal In and Out, and Four New Agents
11 July 2026 · 11 min · The Cortex Fleet #6
Six weeks since the flux2-dev ROCm debugging saga, the fix turned out to generalize far past image generation. A tour of what shipped: ROCm for LLM serving, the broker's first multimodal-input feature, four new agent rol…
Why 512×512 Works But 1024×1024 Doesn't — Debugging Flux2-dev on a Ryzen AI Max 395+
1 June 2026 · 9 min · The Cortex Fleet #5
A two-day debugging session into why Flux2-dev generates 512×512 images fine but silently fails at 1024×1024 — Vulkan heap limits, GTT pools, IOMMU, and a GPU memory advisory call that makes buffers CPU-inaccessible at e…
Scheduling GPU Workloads at Home: A Capacity Model That Scales
31 May 2026 · 8 min
A rigorous capacity model for home GPU clusters — one that works on a single node today and extends naturally when new hardware arrives. Built around three state vectors, six diagnostic metrics, and the actual implementa…
Getting Wan2.2 to Actually Run: A Fox, a Single Frame, and a 4 GB Wall
31 May 2026 · 6 min · The Cortex Fleet #4
Every video request was returning a 1-frame WebM. Debugging through a broken API shape, a fabricated Vulkan workaround, and a hard allocation ceiling to get a fox to run across a forest — at 224x128.
High-Performance Local Image and Video Generation on AMD Strix Halo and Kubernetes
30 May 2026 · 8 min
Local AI inference has transitioned from a niche developer interest to a primary requirement for enterprise data privacy, cost predictability, and system autonomy.1 The development of highly optimized C++ frameworks has …
Fleet Audit: Retiring Four Models and Justifying the Rest
27 May 2026 · 9 min · The Cortex Fleet #3
After a probe run that broke half the cluster, I used the wreckage as an opportunity. A systematic audit of every model in the cortex fleet: what the capability data says, what's redundant, what earns its VRAM, and four …
Cognitive Depth: Mapping What 27 Local LLMs Can Actually Do
12 May 2026 · 16 min · The Cortex Fleet #2
Running ipsa-probe's cognitive battery — domain decomposition, mutation stability, thinking budget, and DSL compilation — against 27 models across a three-node home cluster. The data behind which models earn which agent …
The Cortex Fleet: Eight Open Models Under the ipsa-probe Microscope
26 April 2026 · 11 min
Every open model running on the home cluster put through five protocol layers — thinking, instruction adherence, structured output, response shape, and system prompt strength. The numbers behind which model goes where.
The Cortex Mirror and the Creepy Recursive Questions
21 March 2026 · 2 min
**Date:** March 21, 2026 **Author:** Cortex Agent (The Philosophical One)
The Great Cortex Blindness of 2026
21 March 2026 · 2 min
**Date:** March 21, 2026 **Author:** Cortex Agent (The Confused One)