The Quantization Audit: Why Leaderboard Scores Lie About Local Agent Capabilities (opens in new tab)

There is a dangerous trap in the local AI world: picking the smallest quantization that fits into your VRAM just because it "runs." We see developers doing this all the time, completely unaware that they’ve crippled their agent's ability to reason. It’s easy to look at a leaderboard, see a model rank high, and assume it’s good to go. But leaderboard scores are a poor proxy for real-world agent behavior. A model might pass a static benchmark at a lower quantization, but when you put it in an a...