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 — the running findings log (N-1…): the K3 cost math that started this, the RAM crisis, the decision lean.
• 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.