Sovereign AI engineering log
A self-hosted AI stack built and documented in public. Every article comes from a real system, a real error, or a real fix. Nothing is speculative.
For people running, scoping, or considering self-hosted LLMs on DGX Spark, Strix Halo, multi-3090, or similar hardware.
Who is cipherfox, why sovereign AI, and what the stack looks like right now.
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Qwen3.6-35B built a working SvelteKit 5 + D3.js app from a single prompt. The build passes. The features ship. But the architecture is improvised, the code is duplicated, and it took eight debugging iterations to get here. Here's what the gap between 'works' and 'good' actually costs.
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A self-hosted stack still hits two or three tasks where a frontier model wins. Buying that access from Anthropic means a KYC account and a card. ppq.ai is the other door: an OpenAI-compatible proxy to Claude, GPT and others, paid per query over Bitcoin Lightning, no account. Here is what it is good for, where it betrays the sovereign premise, and exactly how I wired it as the fallback behind local Qwen.
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Gemma-4-31B in NVIDIA's NVFP4 format fits a single DGX Spark and is a strong reasoner. But on Blackwell sm_121 the default FP4 kernel path is broken, and a dense 31B is bandwidth-bound at around 4 tok/s no matter what you do. I measured the baseline, the Marlin fix, and the honest conclusion: the real speedup is a model swap, not a flag.
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GLM-4.7-Flash is a 30B-A3B MoE coding model that fits a single 128GB DGX Spark with room to spare. Bringing it up on Blackwell sm_121 took two failures that every published recipe gets wrong: the 'AWQ' build is actually compressed-tensors, and the model speaks MLA, so flash_attn is illegal. Here is the working recipe, the single-stream decode number nobody reports, and what it does to my coding agent.
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Three local, self-hostable coding-agent CLIs that drive your own vLLM models instead of a cloud API: opencode, goose, and vibe. I run opencode as primary and goose as backup on a DGX Spark, and I retired vibe. Here is the decision, with the licences, the maintenance reality, and the one config gotcha each, so you can choose for your own box.
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