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The Ladder · honest numbers as of 2026-07-10

What's coming — and exactly how far along each rung really is.

Build order is not launch order. Every rung below carries the number we'd stand behind today, and — where that number isn't flattering yet — the specific fix already in progress. Nothing here is a projection dressed up as a result.

1

The toolchain + the gate

Built · launch pending
on every compile, never disabled
native ≡ interp
on every compile, never disabled
live chapters, gate-verified
607
live chapters, gate-verified

The compiler, the four backends, and the acceptance discipline that makes every other rung on this ladder checkable instead of asserted. This is the thing everything else stands on.

Source: efficient/DASHBOARD.md — Strand (A) Lang & Compiler; Chapter Stats

2

The sovereign inference appliance

In progress — the honest speed gap
VRAM vs. llama.cpp's 18.25 GB — 3.1× less, bit-exact
5.8 GB
VRAM vs. llama.cpp's 18.25 GB — 3.1× less, bit-exact
vs. llama.cpp's 201 — honestly ~24× slower, today
8.3 tok/s
vs. llama.cpp's 201 — honestly ~24× slower, today

A 30B-class MoE model, running on one consumer GPU, dequantized bit-exact against llama.cpp (0 mismatches across 114,688 values checked). The memory win is real and measured. The speed is not — we're not hiding that.

Honest update (re-measured 2026-07-10): the earlier FUSE and kernel-launch theories were both tested and falsified — FUSE overhead is ≈0% once warm, and batching the launches made it slower. The real limit is PCIe bandwidth: ~1.1 GB is streamed per token over a Gen3 link (12.4 GB/s), capping this box at ~10.7 tok/s. So the claim is the memory regime — 3.1× less VRAM, bit-exact — not the speed.

Source: efficient/DASHBOARD.md — Strand (E) Navigator, re-measured 2026-07-10 (W3, nav_moe_qwen3_gpudq_fast.cu)

3

The certified corpus

Live counter, as of 2026-07-10
certified functions (target: 50,000 by day 90)
1,053
certified functions (target: 50,000 by day 90)

Real C functions, converted to QUANTA and triple-gated (native ≡ interpreter, compiled against the original C, and value-checked equal) — not claimed, certified. 967 at the start of this build order, then +18, +42 and +27 across three harvest runs as the converter's type coverage grew, less −1 pulled back under the honesty floor (a harness-coincidence false-equivalent). The third run also caught three more false greens *before* they were minted, so they were never counted at all.

Yield only means something with its corpus attached. On numeric C pre-filtered to the long/double subset it is 14 of 15 (93%). On wild, unfiltered C — five permissive repos, 1,423 repo-authored functions — harvest run 3 gate-greened 6.7% and certified 1.9% once duplicates and three refuted false-greens were removed, up from 1.7% and 4.75% on the two earlier runs. The wild figure is low because the converter refuses a plain int: C's 32-bit int wraps where QUANTA's 64-bit integer does not, and it will not certify an equivalence it cannot prove.

Source: efficient/DASHBOARD.md — "THE ONE NUMBER (LOCK-47.8)"; yield by corpus from efficient/impl/quanta/forge/corpus/HARVEST_RUN3.md §3 (run 3, 2026-07-10) and efficient/BRAINSTORM_046.md §0.1 (the long/double subset and the int refusal)

4

q0 — a native code-writing model

Measured, small, real
structural improvement / 5 rounds, self-play flywheel
+14.8pp
structural improvement / 5 rounds, self-play flywheel
semantic improvement / 5 rounds — kept programs genuinely compute
+5.6pp
semantic improvement / 5 rounds — kept programs genuinely compute

A self-improving loop where the model writes QUANTA, the gate checks it, and only genuinely-computing programs are kept — no Python, no downloaded base model. The gains are modest by design: this is the flywheel proven at small scale, not a scaling claim.

Current ceiling is grammar expressiveness (linear maps, not yet rich algorithms) — the next unlock is corpus breadth, not a bigger model.

Source: efficient/DASHBOARD.md — Strand (D) Training

One law, applied to this page

Scary numbers ship with their fix plan. That's the whole rule.

8.3 tok/s next to llama.cpp's 201 looks bad, on its own. Next to the 3.1× VRAM reduction — and named honestly as a PCIe-bandwidth ceiling (~1.1 GB streamed per token, not a bug we’re hiding) — it’s a rung on a ladder, not a hidden weakness. If a number on this page ever stops matching the dashboard it was pulled from, the dashboard wins, and this page changes within the hour.

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    The Ladder — what's coming, with today's honest numbers · vocabotics