Fixing Empty Responses from a Local LLM

The Symptom I spent some time chasing a frustrating failure mode in a self-hosted agent stack: the model was clearly alive, but some requests came back empty, or with enough hidden reasoning overhead that the whole system felt sluggish. The confusing part was that the usual “is the service up?” checks all looked fine. The API responded. The model was loaded on the GPU. Short prompts worked. Health checks passed. But once the prompts got larger, the system started to misbehave in ways that were hard to separate:...

May 31, 2026 · 3 min · Shane Greaves

Automating Hugo Blog Deployment with Gitea Actions and Ansible-Pull

Introduction Today I modernized my Hugo blog deployment pipeline by replacing a Rundeck webhook with a fully automated Gitea Actions workflow using ansible-pull. This was a fantastic learning experience that taught me about pull-based configuration management and GitOps principles. The Old Way: Rundeck Webhook Previously, pushing to the main branch would trigger a Rundeck webhook that orchestrated the entire build and deployment process. While this worked, it had some drawbacks:...

October 19, 2025 · 4 min · Shane Greaves