Historical plans and research

These records describe work completed during 6–7 September 2026. They are kept for research sources, measurement caveats and implementation history. They are not current instructions or a roadmap. Statements about permissions, absent tests/CI/documentation, local paths and subsequent work belong to those sessions. The original contents are retained apart from archive notices and repaired links; status lines such as “awaiting user review” have not been rewritten as current claims.

Use the current documentation, development guide and defaults and measurements for maintained guidance. Runtime recommendation evidence lives in the packaged recommendations.json and saved experiment records.

• Qwen performance and understandable defaults: implementation slices
• RTX local inference performance review
• UI improvements: open the panel, start a recommended model
• UI usability and visual polish

Retired handoffs

The original PLAN.md and HANDOFF.md are available at the last revision before retirement. They have been removed from the working tree because their setup, authority and next-session instructions are superseded. Their historical validation records remain accessible through these permanent links.

Handoff follow-up review, 9 September 2026

The following review preserves unresolved work without treating the old handoff as current authority. This was a source inspection, not new GPU validation.

Original follow-up	Finding at retirement
Download artifact identity	Partially addressed: newly discovered HF variants pin a repository revision. Seed entries still default to main, and model downloads validate the GGUF header rather than a final content digest. Resume identity and integrity remain follow-ups.
Qwen3.8 reasoning effort	Still relevant: shared settings allow minimal and max, while the bundled Qwen3.8 template accepts low, medium, xhigh, and maps high to xhigh. Model-specific choices need qualification.
Unreadable custom templates	Still relevant: capability inspection directly reads the template. Launch validation checks file existence, but capability reporting could give a clearer unavailable state for read failures.
Empty engine-root entries	Addressed: config.ENGINE_ROOTS filters out empty entries.
Context ceiling below the workload minimum	Addressed: context search records a skipped result with an explicit minimum-budget explanation.
Result size and polling cost	Partially addressed: status polling is guarded against overlap, and result summaries omit prompt payloads. Full records retain provenance; summary refresh cost remains worth profiling as the database grows.
AMD/Intel Vulkan support	Remains outside the NVIDIA workbench scope; no hardware scope change is implied by this archive.

Existing issues retain the larger research threads: concurrent coding requests and vLLM comparison, panel downloads for DFlash drafters, and CUDA mixed K/V kernels. Other ideas in the performance plan’s “Later work” section remain historical research candidates, rather than accepted implementation tasks.