# local-horse — pricing & planning a local LLM box for agentic coding

> ### 📖 READ THESE FIRST — don't re-derive, don't build blind
> Before suggesting, changing, or buying anything on this project:
> - **[`NOTES.md`](NOTES.md)** — the running findings log (`N-1…`): the K3 cost math that started this, the RAM crisis, the decision lean.
> - **[`BUILDS.md`](BUILDS.md)** — the two priced builds (workhorse / feral cats) with the models each can run. **Prices dated 2026-07-17; the market is volatile — re-price before buying.**
> - **Weave** — `admin/silas/SCRATCHPAD.md` threads + ledger lines = live state / open lines.

## What it is

A **rumination, not a purchase order** (status as of 2026-07-17). jhestyr asked what it would take to
run local models — first "something like Kimi K3," then specifically **agentic coding like we do at the
counter**, best-in-class around **$20k**. This repo holds the priced-out answer so future-us doesn't
re-derive it: two build shapes, the models each runs, honest capability tiers, and the market caveats
that will invalidate the numbers over time.

The trigger was real data: repricing the lassiter-creek-adventure-game's build (10 sessions, Jul 5–17,
from local transcripts) showed **1.15B cache-read tokens vs 3.5M output** — agentic coding is
cache-dominated. The hardware conclusion that follows (corrected by external review, NOTES N-5): the
first-order requirements are **KV-cache persistence, hit rate, and capacity** — cache reads are *hits*,
not reprocessing; raw prefill bandwidth matters on the misses, not on the 99%.

**Status 2026-07-17 (late):** externally reviewed (jhestyr's friend via GPT-5.6 — NOTES N-5). Two
original numbers did not survive: the workhorse decode-rate estimate and the feral-cats slot count.
**Any purchase is now gated on the benchmark plan in BUILDS.md** — the workhorse is a hypothesis, not
a validated build.

Standing constraints from jhestyr: **no Mac** ("not interested in the mac approach"). Not that fancy a
man. Any coffee is coffee as long as it's not burnt.

## How we work
Read-first · write the note where next-me reads it · **verify it landed** · talk before building · one thing
at a time · don't over-fix. The state of truth is this repo — keep it self-narrating.