Fixed three bugs that made Qwen3.5-122B a daily driver on Mac Studio

A developer details the process of optimizing the Qwen 3.5 122B large language model to run efficiently on a Mac Studio. The article covers debugging cache leaks and system prompt issues to achieve a responsive pair-programming experience.
Why it matters
As local inference becomes more accessible, optimizing high-parameter models for consumer hardware is essential for privacy-focused and offline AI development.
Table of Contents Why I switched models The real work: killing three bugs Bug one: a timestamp in the system prompt Bug two: the reply that never happened Bug three: poison in the checkpoint store Where it landed Honest numbers qMLX and the tools The verdict A follow-up question on a 50,000 token conversation took three to five minutes before the first token appeared. Not the full answer. The first token. That is not a chatbot, it is a batch job, and you go and make a cup of coffee while it thinks.
The article is a personal technical account of software optimization and hardware performance.
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