The Stack Below the Stack (Part 1): Physics of a Request

The Stack Below the Stack , a 3-part series on how modern LLM inference actually works, told through a single DeepSeek V4 dtype bug that crashed a two-node deployment at startup. Part 1 (this post) · Physics of a request : why waiting for the first token is a different problem from streaming the rest, and why batching exists. Part 2 · Below Python : what actually runs under vllm serve , and why…