shoehorn — make any language model fit your machine

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📂 **Category**:

✅ **What You’ll Learn**:

Make any language model fit the memory you actually have.

Preset quantizations ignore your hardware: pick one that fits and you
either waste hundreds of megabytes of quality headroom or find out at load time it
didn’t fit after all. shoehorn starts from the memory you actually have, subtracts
what inference itself needs, and solves a per-tensor mixed-precision assignment
that lands within a rounding error of the remainder — routinely using
99.99% of the budget, sometimes to the byte.

$ shoehorn fit unsloth/Qwen3-4B-GGUF –serve
weights: 519.2 MiB of 519.2 MiB budget (99.998% used, 13 KB slack)

Before you download

What fits your machine?

Pick your hardware and this page scans Hugging Face’s most-downloaded
models for ones shoehorn can fit to your budget — ranked by the quality your memory
affords. Runs entirely in your browser.





Get shoehorn

Install

shoehorn needs llama.cpp
on your PATH as the inference backend (the Homebrew install pulls it in for you).
Then shoehorn ui opens the local app — pick a model, press one
button, chat.

brew install notactuallytreyanastasio/shoehorn/shoehorn

Or from source: cargo install --path .
after cloning the repo.
All releases.

The app

One button, your whole budget

The local web app measures your machine, streams the fit, renders the
budget as a tape measure, puts a perplexity number on what the fit cost, and ends at
a Chat button.

a finished fit: the tape-measure budget gauge at 99.998% used, the per-type mix, and Chat and Measure buttons
the discovery card: models ranked by what your budget affords, each with a Use button

MIT-licensed. The quantizer is implemented from scratch in Rust — no llama.cpp code
linked — and the output is standard GGUF v3 that anything downstream of llama.cpp
loads. Source ·
design history ·
releases

⚡ **What’s your take?**
Share your thoughts in the comments below!

#️⃣ **#shoehorn #language #model #fit #machine**

🕒 **Posted on**: 1787070060

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