Evgeny Osipchuk.

A retrospective on bringing up vLLM with FlashInfer on 8×H100 in an air-gapped environment – no root, no internet, every package pre-approved. Why a plain pip install doesn't work here, how to assemble a complete CUDA toolchain by hand from separate RPM components, and which traps – an incomplete repo package, a missing header, a linker that can't find cudart, and a stale JIT cache – stand between you and working inference. Part one of a series on LLM inference in an air-gapped environment.

A retrospective on our LLM mentor for sales managers – a 2023–2024 project. Picking the prompt through failures, designing a pilot without a 'Big Brother' effect, an A/B test that went the wrong way, and a three-step prompt chain instead of one. This is the first article in the series – an overview: the journey, the failures, and the five takeaways I've been carrying into every LLM product since.