Can you give some pointers on where to start? I know very little beyond “run this with llama.cpp” and a few options.

I honestly don’t know a “tutorial” source to point to. For all its hype, the documentation for local LLM hacking is shockingly bad, every influencer I’ve seen is uninformative, and for whatever reason the tinkerer communities choose to hang out in Discords, Twitter, or other information black holes…

I can point to my stack though.

I use Mikupad for experimentation: https://github.com/lmg-anon/mikupad

Look up a particular LLM’s 'raw" chat syntax, past it in, and you can experiment with what the LLM actually ‘sees’ and outputs when it inferences. It’s quite enlightening.

Some UIs like kobold.cpp let you “modify” chat templates to jailbreak them to, or switch to raw completion syntax temporarily. So they’re more of a hybrid of traditional chatbot chat and a mikupad-like raw scratchpad.

For a backend, if you are on Nvidia, I’d recommend looking into exllamav3 these days (and its API server, TabbyAPI). It gives me a considerable speed boost with offloaded MoE models, and I can fit larger models than mainline llama.cpp.

Look up “control vector” on huggingface. These are basically ways to ‘steer’ LLM output without finetuning them: https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified&search=control+vector

The people that make them are also worth following, as they tend to be LLM tinkerers. There are a few interesting discussions/threads buried through huggingface, but you kind of have to stumble into them.