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ctxprefill
confirmedPython · llama.cppInference & servingJuly 6, 2026
the question
Where's the O(n^2) attention wall in prompt prefill?
what came out
Real and measurable: per-token prefill cost rises quadratically (positive coefficient, tight CI excluding zero) -- ms/token climbs 20-31% from ~10k to ~40k tokens. Prefill stops being linear well before your context window does. All three predictions held.
method & receipts
- Result: confirmed
- Pre-registered — the prediction was written down and committed before the run.
- Reproducible — one script re-runs the whole thing from scratch.
- Independently reviewed — an adversarial review pass, kept in the repo.
- Machine-readable claims — every reported number, in a checkable file.
- Tested — a correctness/benchmark suite ships alongside the code.
→ read the code and re-run it
github.com/v-code01/ctxprefill