README.md

metadata

title: chatMCD API
emoji: 🔬
colorFrom: indigo
colorTo: gray
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 5.49.1
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
license: apache-2.0
short_description: Inference endpoint for chatMCD, Marc C. Deller's assistant

chatMCD — inference endpoint

Answers questions about Marc C. Deller, D.Phil. in the third person, by retrieving from his own writing.

This Space is a debug surface. The product is chatmcd.mdeller.com, a Flask app that holds the Hugging Face token and streams from the /chat endpoint here.

Provenance

Everything was produced on a 64 GB M1 Max:

Stage	Where	Tool
Corpus and Q&A	local	training/build_jsonl.py
Retrieval index	local	scripts/build_rag_index.py
LoRA voice layer (optional)	local	mlx_lm.lora
MLX to PEFT conversion	local	convert/mlx_to_peft.py
Parity verification	local	convert/verify_parity.py
Inference	here	transformers + peft on ZeroGPU

No rented GPU was used at any point. ZeroGPU is inference only and cannot load an MLX adapter, so the adapter is converted rather than retrained: the two produce byte-identical delta weights, which verify_parity.py checks against the trained tensors and against the model's own logits.

Configuration

Variable	Default	Meaning
BASE_MODEL	Qwen/Qwen3-8B	base checkpoint
ADAPTER	Dellboy/chatmcd-8b	optional voice layer, merged at load; set empty to serve the base model
RAG_ENABLED	1	retrieval is the primary mechanism, not a fallback
RAG_TOP_K	8	Q&A pairs retrieved per query
RAG_KINDS	hybrid	hybrid = Q&A pairs plus corpus chunks
RAG_CHUNKS	3	corpus chunks added in hybrid mode; the only route to the 215 blog posts

Scope

chatMCD answers about Marc only, and says so rather than guessing when a question falls outside what it was trained on.