Anatomy of a Quantized Agent: VRAM Stability and Forecasting in Code-Synthesis Agentic Workloads

Abstract

Analytical models of peak VRAM consumption for LLM inference decompose memory into weight-storage, KV-cache, and activation terms parameterized by step count, tool invocations, and context expansion. We evaluate this decomposition empirically within a strictly scoped measurement study: a LangGraph-based CUDA-kernel-synthesis agent (AgentK), a 4-bit quantization family (Q4 K M), a single NVIDIA H100 GPU, and four LLM backbones across 1,920 trajectories. Focusing on peak-memory forecasting behavior, we report two primary observations. First, closed-form analytical models achieve competitive accuracy when provided with two empirical constants: loaded-weight VRAM and a fixed activation-memory overhead. Supplied with live GPU readings and ground-truth trajectory parameters, the closed-form model matches or outperforms the best learned baseline on three of the four backbones (test MAPE 2.2-4.4% vs. 3.4-6.5%, p = 0.76). The exception is the smallest backbone (Phi-4-mini), where minimal VRAM variance (CV 0.3%) causes dynamic modeling to underperform simple regression. Second, compile success strictly bifurcates by backbone capacity (from 5.7% for Phi-4-mini to 62.0% for Qwen2.5-Coder-14B), demonstrating that functional code synthesis remains constrained by intrinsic LLM capabilities rather than available memory. Furthermore, because overall peak-memory variance is remarkably low across all backbones (CV 0.3-9.4%), learned prompt-feature regression offers statistically insignificant improvements over a constant-mean baseline. Consequently, we find no justification for deploying complex predictive VRAM models in highly quantized, weight-dominated regimes. We release the evaluated corpus and anonymized framework to support replication.