Quartermaster tools (assistant self-service)

Quartermaster tools let the chat assistant look at - and, with your approval, tune - the Quartermaster instance it's running in. Toggle them per chat with QM Tools in the Configs popover (on by default). They only act on this running instance, and they never load or unload models - that would evict the very model you're talking to.

Inspect (read-only). One slice per call, so the assistant pulls only what it needs:

• status / loaded / vram - what's running right now, with idle-TTL, live GPU/VRAM and system RAM.
• models - the whole installed catalog (not just loaded ones) with capabilities, context length, state and variant count.
• settings - the global memory knobs.
• backends - the registry: which executable and managed build each class runs, which is the ★ auto-pick, and whether any exe has gone missing from disk.
• a model id - that model's effective config plus its variants, each shown as the exact launch-flag deviations from the base command.
• estimate - a what-if load plan for a model: chosen context, GPU/CPU layer split, estimated VRAM against the budget and RAM against the cap. It can size a proposed tuning before suggesting it, and nothing is changed by asking.
• logs - the last lines of Quartermaster's own lifecycle log, or the raw backend output (where a CUDA/Vulkan allocation failure actually shows), or both. This is what lets it diagnose a load failure or crash you just hit.
• fields - the complete list of settings it is able to change, with types.

So "what models do I have?", "how much VRAM is free?", "why did that model fail to load?" and "would a 64k context still fit?" are all answerable from the real state rather than a guess.

Configure (approval-gated). It can change:

• Global memory settings - VRAM target, headroom, max RAM, idle-unload TTL (the dashboard Settings).
• A model's config - context, KV quant, CPU offload and the rest - or one named variant of it.
• Your playground preferences - temperature, max tokens, thinking budget, web search on/off and the search knobs. These are your own per-user prefs and take effect on your next page reload.

You approve every change. When the assistant wants to configure something, the chat pauses and shows a before -> after diff card with Accept and Deny. Nothing is applied until you accept; deny - or just ignore it, it times out - and nothing happens. Accepting a global or model change hot-reloads the config in place: running models are not evicted, and a changed model's new launch args apply the next time it loads.

Editing needs the server running with config editing enabled (-generate); inspection works either way.

This page is generated from the help wiki that ships inside the app: the same text you get from the Help button, and the same text the playground assistant searches. Corrections go to wiki_articles.json.