Notes, benchmarks and field reports.

September 28, 2026 · 6 min read

Zero-shot classification in production: self-hosted jeff vs jev on 10 real use cases

Can a 400M-parameter model on a MacBook replace a hosted classification API? I ran both on 2,040 items drawn from real product use cases. The answer depends on the kind of question, and on how you phrase it.

• AI engineering
• Benchmark
• Classification
• Guardrails