Skills
Speculative decoding is now a production default — and it now extends to reasoning steps
Speculative decoding (a fast draft model proposes tokens, the large target model verifies them in parallel) went from research to production standard in 2026, built into vLLM, SGLang, and TensorRT-LLM, cutting time-to-first-token 2-3x at unchanged quality for single-user serving. The newer angle: techniques like SpecReason push speculation from token-level to multi-step *reasoning*, hitting 1.5-2.5x speedups while improving answer accuracy up to 9.9%. If you self-host and have tight latency SLAs, enabling it is close to free throughput.
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