Scaling LLMs at the Edge: A journey through distillation, routers, and embeddings

I have extensively edited this article after an LLM agent combed through my codebase and prepared the initial draft. Originally published at Sisyphus Consulting blog At Sisyphus Consulting , We recently launched a unique product in the market: physical facilitation cards + digital tools for virtual facilitation. They're named Wu Wei Cards . But this write-up is not about the product. I want to share the behind-the-scenes events of how I navigated through tinkering with LLMs, Embeddings and the whole trial-and-error. If you're building something in AI-space, I hope this would be helpful to you. First, let me give the background so that you know the WHATs and WHYs. The Product and the Constraint Wu Wei Cards is a deck of 50 hand-drawn metaphorical cards for facilitators, coaches, and therapists. People use them in workshops. To help participants reflect, open up, and explore ideas through objects and images rather than direct questioning. This is how they look like: Anyone who buys the p