# Offloading model work to the workstation

*Last verified: 2026-08-02 @ 5c05163. Living doc: correct it in place, do not append.*

Owner's call, 2026-08-02. Vikunja #483 is the umbrella. Tasks #484 to #487 are the
work, and this file holds the shape and the rules all four must obey.

## The goal

homesrv cannot grow a GPU. The workstation has 16GB of VRAM. Move the model work
to the workstation and leave homesrv running the logic that must be always-on,
deterministic and cheap.

## Why this is tractable

The split already exists structurally. `mavsttd` and `mavttsd` are separate
daemons that core reaches over a socket, not linked libraries. Moving them off-box
is a transport change, not a redesign.

The microphone is at the workstation, because that is where the owner sits and
homesrv is headless. So speech-to-text and the wake word are already on the
workstation side by construction. Audio never has to cross the LAN. Only the core
turn does.

## The constraint that shapes everything

The workstation's GPU is often busy: CPT runs, experiments, Correx, the manga-recap
pipeline. It also sleeps. homesrv does not.

So an offloaded model is never *the* model. It is the preferred one, with a floor
on homesrv. That is the shape the cascade already has, where a router error falls
through to the classifier.

## The degradation rule

Two cases, and the line between them is sharp.

**Fall back silently** when the workstation model would only do the job *better*:
routing, phrasing, a nudge. Falling back costs nothing that exists today, because
the resident Qwen3-1.7B is today's production quality. The owner should not be told
that his reply was phrased by the smaller model.

**Name the gap** when the resident model cannot do the job *at all*. A world
question that a 1.7B answers by inventing is the case. A wrong answer is worse
than "не могу сейчас". This is the rule CLAUDE.md already states for a sibling
service being down.

Nothing in between. A turn never breaks on the workstation being asleep.

## Admission control, not a scheduler

There is no GPU arbiter. That is a service with its own failure modes, and nothing
here needs work *distributed*. It needs admission control. The workstation
advertises free VRAM over a health endpoint, and Maven treats it as one more query
source that claims a turn or passes. llama-server also refuses to load when VRAM is
short, so the failure is detectable without cooperation from the owner's other
jobs.

The caller must be able to ask "is this peer usable right now" without a turn
hanging on a timeout. A dead remote is a normal state, not an error state.
`internal/llm.Pair` is that check on the Maven side. A prober caches the answer,
so `Available()` is an atomic read and no turn pays for a health check.

llama-server does not stay up on the workstation. It cannot: a resident 7-14B
would hold 16GB against the owner's CPT runs. So a supervisor there owns its
lifecycle, keeps it loaded while the card is free, and unloads it on idle or
when another process needs the card (owner's call, 2026-08-02, Vikunja #488).

That supervisor is still not a scheduler, and the distinction is worth holding.
It arbitrates nothing between callers. It reports whether it can take work and
manages one process to back that answer. Maven never asks it to start anything
and never learns that it did.

## What stays on homesrv, permanently

The **embedder** (multilingual-e5-small, ONNX, CPU). It backs the classifier, which
must answer while the GPU is saturated. It is also cheap enough on CPU that moving
it buys nothing. Four callers:

| Caller | What for |
|---|---|
| `internal/router/classifier.go` | the routing floor |
| `cmd/mavend/actions_query.go` (`queryEmbed`) | memory recall |
| `cmd/mavend/feeds.go` | ingest embedding for every RSS item |
| `internal/crawl/watch.go` | ingest embedding for every crawled page |

`internal/speaker` becomes a fifth once it lands.

## Inventory: what runs a model on homesrv today

The **resident model** is one llama-server with seven callers:

| Caller | What for |
|---|---|
| `cmd/mavend/voicewire.go` | routing |
| `cmd/mavend/replier_llm.go` | replies |
| `cmd/mavend/tick.go` | digestion worker: `PhraseNudge`, `PhraseReminder` |
| `cmd/mavend/capture.go` | capture summarisation (unreachable, see #480) |
| `cmd/mavend/mail.go` | mail extraction (off, no IMAP) |
| `cmd/mavend/kiwixwire.go` | answering from a Kiwix, search or crawl passage |
| `memoryeval.go`, `modelswap.go` | admin and evals |

Then the embedder above, **whisper.cpp** in `mavsttd`, and **piper** in `mavttsd`.
`mavwaked` uses no model at all: an energy-threshold VAD over 30ms frames.

## Order

1. **Transport** (#484). Nothing else is possible until a seam can cross a host.
   `internal/netaddr` landed in PR #92. A seam address now carries its own scheme,
   and a scheme-less one is still unix. A tcp seam requires a shared token, because
   the filesystem permission that authenticated the unix socket is gone.
2. **The resident model** (#485). Biggest quality delta. A 16GB card runs a 7-14B,
   which fixes what the 1.7B gets wrong: world knowledge, and the persona the CPT
   targets. The degradation path is already written and measured, since the
   classifier scores 68.8% full accuracy at p50 16.6µs on its own.
3. **Speech-to-text and text-to-speech** (#486). They gain a real margin, but on
   quality alone, and both already work.
4. **The wake word** (#487). Independent of all of the above.

## Assumptions

- The LAN is trusted enough that wireguard is supported but not required (owner's
  call). What crosses the wire is still his utterances. That is why the tcp seam
  carries its own token instead of assuming a network boundary.
- The workstation is not expected to be up. Every child task must still serve a
  turn while it is down.