I know how training and inference works under the hood, I know the activation functions and backprop and MMUL, and I know some real applications I really want to build. But there's still plenty of room in the gap between that LM studio helps fill. I also already have software built around the openai api, and the lmstudio openai api emulator is hard to beat for convenience. But if you can outline a process I could follow (or link good literature) to shift towards running LLMs locally with FOSS but still interact with them through an API, I'll absolutely give it a try.
"hopping between these products instead of learning and understanding" was intended to exclude people who already know how they work, because I think it is totally fine to use them if you know exactly what all the current knobs and levers do.
