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The Cortex Fleet
The homelab's model fleet, probed, audited and debugged, in order.
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 …
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 …
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.
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…
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…
Small Models, One Semaphore: NPU Use-Cases, a Concurrency Rewrite, and Flux.2's Ghost Dependency
1 August 2026 · 10 min · The Cortex Fleet #7
The NPU bring-up from a few posts back finally got real workloads: a chat router and speech-to-text, live. Getting there meant reverting a concurrency design after review, which surfaced a genuine scheduler bug behind fl…
The Media Models Were Never Actually Tested
6 August 2026 · 8 min · The Cortex Fleet #8
A routine capability audit turned up a model actively crash-looping, a wrong-model bug hiding behind a right-looking filename, a deployment missing two-thirds of its own pipeline, and generation parameters that were bein…
The Probe That Measured Itself
23 August 2026 · 9 min · The Cortex Fleet #12
A model emitted one token 23,195 times and every health check said fine. Auditing why led to a capability-measurement system that was mostly measuring its own test harness — struct defaults serialized as findings, probes…
The First Machine We Didn't Own
21 September 2026 · 15 min · The Cortex Fleet #13
A friend brought a MacBook over for an evening. Eight minutes after enrolling it was serving claims; within a day it had found a bug that had been in our worker since August and was invisible on every machine we owned. T…
The Devil's Advocate Verdict: Does a 122B Model Earn Its Keep on a Homelab APU?
17 August 2026 · 7 min · The Cortex Fleet
Challenged to find a demonstrable reason to keep a 122B MoE model in the fleet, or admit there isn't one. It's genuinely excellent at some things and unreliable at almost everything else — including the things it's good …