If your local-Ollama agent has been getting quietly worse for no obvious reason — same model, same hardware, same prompts — there's a good chance you're hitting an invisible ceiling that produces no error, no warning, and no log line. Just an empty response where an answer used to be. I want to walk through how this manifests, why it's specifically painful for autonomous agent workloads (not chat)
When you have 5 unrelated questions, should you pack them into one message to the LLM, or send 5 requests simultaneously? Which is faster? Splitting into multiple independent parallel requests is almost always faster. This isn't a gut feeling — it's determined by the underlying inference mechanism of LLMs. Let's walk through the reasoning from first principles. To understand this problem, you firs