quick recap on why the scope completely escalated: my first ship attempt for thalamus got rejected because the UI looked like a generic template wrapper and the documentation felt AI-generated. instead of just patching the CSS, i decided to completely overhaul the core engine and train a custom 32B model optimized for raw code logic—named thalamus-thor-1.

here is the brutal reality of the last 24 hours:

1. the infrastructure and credit crunch
i previously planned to use puter.js as a temporary backend fallback router for the claude models while training. scratch that. puter.js is way too limited for the multi-agent architecture i’m running, so i’m entirely stranded there. right now, i’m burning through the absolute last of my AWS credits. i’ve applied for google cloud credits to spin up proper GPU instances, but everything hinges on getting that approval before the AWS runway hits zero. surviving on nothing but hope and coffee.

2. 13 hours battling kaggle
i spent 13 hours straight fighting out-of-memory (OOM) errors and kaggle’s infrastructure quirks. i successfully patched the local OOM issues, but now i’m hitting a wall with their session killers. the platform completely terminates the notebook due to compute spikes right when ZeRO-3 is about to initialize. the screenshot for this post is the raw kaggle output cell showing exactly where the infra drops the hammer.

because of this, i’ve applied for amd gpu credits. they’re vastly cheaper than nvidia options but offer massive amounts of vram, which is exactly what a high-context 32b setup needs to handle codebase ingestions via RoPE and YaRN.

3. Social Media
on the startup side, my teammate is taking over the social media presence and will start pushing updates the second the app is not hope it’s functional.

4. dependency utility side-project
ironically, fighting package conflicts during this 13-hour nightmare gave me an idea for a quality-of-life tool. i built a clean CLI tool for coders that natively resolves dependency hell. the core logic is already up and running perfectly.

you can track and follow the new CLI project here: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/6323

going back to tweaking the zero-3 configurations before the credits completely empty out.