Compare serving quantization options, FP8, INT8, INT4, GPTQ, AWQ. What breaks, and how do you decide?
Bits buy bandwidth, bandwidth buys tokens, until quality quietly craters on code and math. A decision framework with the numbers, what GPTQ and AWQ actually do differently, and the eval discipline that keeps you out of trouble.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Bits buy bandwidth, bandwidth buys tokens, until quality quietly craters on code and math. A decision framework with the numbers, what GPTQ and AWQ actually do differently, and the eval discipline that keeps you out of trouble.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
