Applied curiosity / open tools / field notes
Vienna / 48.2082 N / 16.3738 E / 28 C / partly cloudy
Thinking with machines.
This is the personal site of Lukas Stepanek: technical work, careful writing, and human-scale questions about thinking with machines.
Research, writing, and experiments from the edge where ideas have to meet tools, limits, and other people.
papers / constraints / technical notes
tools / projects / useful lessons
notes / fragments / field observations
email / github / say hello
currently resident
arXiv preprint
resident claims
technical notes
field observations
Current signal
Feature names are not the contract.
Resident KV is a small research line about when future KV reuse becomes a runtime obligation rather than just a cache hint. The first preprint defines the contract under active KV pressure; the second asks how runtime primitives, adapters, and patches can satisfy that contract without turning nearby features into false positives.
The useful review question is still correction-friendly: which obligation boundary is wrong, too strong, too weak, or already covered by a runtime path I missed?
Open researchResearch
Where ideas meet limits.
Papers, technical notes, and implementation questions around practical ML systems.
arXiv preprint
Resident KV Claims
A semantic contract for how inference runtimes should behave when resident KV blocks and active KV pressure compete for the same memory pool.
arXiv preprint
Fail-Closed Lowering Of Resident KV Claims
A Resident KV paper on when runtime primitives, adapters, or patches can be treated as evidence for accepted future-KV obligations.
Signals
Notes, fragments, and field observations.
Field note / May 28, 2026
The Win Was To Move The Cost
A local vLLM/Mooncake field note: user-path restore lost, request-shaped background prewarm amortized, and the controls separated native prefix/cache-key reuse from semantic adoption.
Field note / May 23, 2026
The Dream Is Large. The Claim Is Small.
A first field note on the Resident KV Claims paper, open-source ambition, and why a bounded runtime contract can still feel like a real contribution.
Field note / May 24, 2026
A Used 3090 And The Shape Of The Work
A personal field note on open-source ambition, accidental hardware constraints, information overload, and why local AI work had to become more evidence-bound.
About
Technical work, kept in proportion.
This site belongs to Lukas Stepanek, also known as krooksn / krx in some corners of the internet. I am an independent researcher and builder based in Vienna, with most of my attention on machine learning systems, autonomous agents, practical research tools, and the constraints that show up on real machines.
I care about open-source communities, serious technical practice, and a life that still has texture outside it.
Read the longer storyContact
Drop me a line.
Research questions, open-source projects, writing, or a conversation are all welcome.