The Hermes probe reported "never became healthy" after an hour. It had not
failed to load — it had never been scheduled, because both iGPUs were busy with
other jobs and there are only two.
Same blind spot as the eval pods sitting in Init: from outside, "waiting" and
"will never start" look identical, and the message blamed the model. It now
prints the pod phase every two minutes and exits immediately with the
scheduler's own reason when it cannot place the pod.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Third false verdict from this script in a row, all the same shape: it asked
whether "Paris" came back, and a working model failed twice for reasons that
had nothing to do with the defect.
read only `content` -> a thinking model writes to reasoning_content
64-token budget -> a thinking model never reaches the answer
Both were my bounds, not the model's, which is the error that has run through
this whole exercise.
So it now tests the defect itself. The signature is a single token repeated —
" de de de", " phosphorus phosphorus", whitespace — and a run is BROKEN when
one token is more than half the output, EMPTY when nothing comes back. That
survives truncation, does not care which field the model writes to, and does
not require the model to finish or to be right.
The general lesson, since it cost three attempts: an implausible reading is the
only kind that gets checked. BROKEN at 154 prompt tokens was obviously wrong,
so it got investigated. A boundary reported at 4000 would have been believed —
it would have fit the expectation. That is exactly how the 768-token cap, the
Q8 comparison and the 35B threshold all survived as long as they did.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
First run of probe-length.sh called Qwen3-8B BROKEN at 154 prompt tokens. No
model degenerates at 154 tokens — the verdict was wrong, not the model.
It read only `content`, and a thinking model puts its answer in
`reasoning_content` and leaves content empty. Empty content is not a broken
model, and this is the same mistake that made Qwen3.6 look slow and broken this
morning before --reasoning off went in.
Now reads both fields.
Noting it because the script exists specifically to stop me judging models on
bad readings, and its first reading was bad. A tool that checks the instrument
still has to be checked itself — the 154 is what gave it away, since it was
implausible rather than merely unwelcome.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything this harness measured about failing candidates was the wrong thing.
On this Vulkan/Iris Xe stack every model has a prompt length past which
llama.cpp stops producing language and repeats a single token — " de de de",
" the the the", " phosphorus phosphorus", or whitespace. Silent: HTTP 200,
finish_reason "stop", nothing in the log. And stateful: one request past the
boundary breaks the slot for everything after it until the pod restarts.
Which means a 50-document run measures where each model's boundary sits
relative to paperless's ~5300-token request, and nothing else. "Failed 3 of 3"
is one measurement, not three — the first document took the other two with it.
Demonstrated on gemma-4-26B-A4B, which I had written up as failing on
capability:
fresh pod, "Nenne die Hauptstadt von Frankreich" -> "Die Hauptstadt von
Frankreich ist Paris."
same pod after one 5000-token request -> " phosphorus phosphorus..."
fresh pod, 2334-token prompt, no tools at all -> whitespace
The model is fine. Its boundary is under 2334 tokens, so it can never serve a
paperless request, and every classification number I recorded for it described
a corrupted slot.
So the size threshold, the generation theory and the capability rankings are
all withdrawn. What correlated with success was having a boundary above 5300 —
Qwen3.6 measured coherent at 13588 — not being larger or newer.
probe-length.sh answers that in minutes instead of ninety. A fresh pod per
size, because probing sizes in sequence against one server would measure the
first bad request and nothing after it.
The galling part is that this defect is already documented in my own notes from
this morning, boundary and slot-poisoning both, and I did not apply it when
reading the results.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
claude-botandClaude Opus 5