Auditing Strata: 125B on a 12 GB Card, 62 GB/s of RAM Bandwidth, and a 5× Contradiction in the Docs

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Niko1221/Strata promises that a 125-billion-parameter model — Qwen3.8-Flash-Next — runs on your own gaming PC, that “a graphics card with 12 GB or more” is enough, and that it writes 94 tokens per second while doing it. It was created on 24 September 2026 and pushed to on 4 October, it reached the front page of Hacker News with 595 points and 279 comments, and it has 11,048 stars and 969 forks in 11 days.

The headline is the kind that usually collapses on contact. This one does not. I downloaded the repository, queried the GitHub API for the release, contributor and issue history, read the three documents that describe the engine, pulled the documentation’s own numbers apart, and did the memory-bandwidth arithmetic myself. The speed claim survives — but it survives for a reason the marketing sentence hides, and the same repository contradicts itself by a factor of 5.3 on prompt speed.

Auditing the Caveman Skill: 109,102 Stars, a 65% Headline, and the 3% Its Own Eval Publishes

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

JuliusBrussee/caveman is the loudest token-saving project of 2026. Its GitHub description reads: “Viral skill + proxy for coding agents that cuts 65% of tokens by talking like a caveman.” It has 109,102 stars, 6,315 forks, 71 contributors and 346,877 release-asset downloads. Its top Hacker News thread hit 904 points and 366 comments one day after the repository was created. It shipped 42 releases. JetBrains built a three-part benchmark series around it.

So I cloned it at commit 8af1f1b (3 October 2026, 00:38Z), measured the repository, ran its own evaluation harness against its own committed data, ran its own compression benchmark against its own fixtures, read the source of its telemetry receiver and audited its CI workflows.

Open Source Audit on SoloSoft

Auditing Strata: 125B on a 12 GB Card, 62 GB/s of RAM Bandwidth, and a 5× Contradiction in the Docs

Auditing the Caveman Skill: 109,102 Stars, a 65% Headline, and the 3% Its Own Eval Publishes