r/LocalLLaMA June 29, 2026 · Communities

Apparently you can skip entire transformer blocks at load time with minimal performance impact

Following recent (very cool) papers, I implemented this as a --skip-layers flag to a llama.cpp fork, so it just never instantiates the blocks you tell it to skip. Bake-time pruning already exists (--prune-layers, mergekit passthrough etc.); this is just the runtime version of the same idea. One important note here is t