Profiling and the Optimization Workflow — Measure, Don't Guess
Everything in this series converges on one discipline: you cannot optimize what you haven't measured. GPU performance is unintuitive — the bottleneck is rarely where you'd guess — so the engineers who make inference fast are the ones who profile first, identify the actual limit, apply the one lever that moves it, and measure again. This closing post ties the series into a workflow you can actually run, and looks at where inference engineering is heading.
You can't optimize what you haven't measured. The optimization loop — baseline, profile, find the dominant limit, apply the matching lever, repeat — plus knowing when to stop, leaning on the ecosystem, and the durable mental model behind it all.