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[ARTICLE · art-101567] src=notactuallytreyanastasio.github.io ↗ pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Show HN: Shoehorn – Quantize any model down to run on your machine

Shoehorn, a new open-source tool from developer notactuallytreyanastasio, quantizes any language model to fit a user's available memory, using up to 99.99% of the budget. It solves a per-tensor mixed-precision assignment based on the user's hardware, and integrates with llama.cpp as the inference backend. The tool is available via Homebrew or Cargo, and includes a local web app that measures the machine, streams the fit, and shows the perplexity cost.

read1 min views1 publishedAug 18, 2026
Show HN: Shoehorn – Quantize any model down to run on your machine
Image: source

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.

weights: 519.2 MiB of 519.2 MiB budget (99.998% used, 13 KB slack)

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.

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](https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/shoehorn).
All [releases](https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/shoehorn/releases).

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.

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