fix(nevermore): repoint onto live aliases — its LLM pass had been dead 8 days

nevermore pinned LLAMA_SWAP_MODEL=granite-4.1-8b, an alias retired with the
granite seat on 2026-08-12. Every summarization call since then failed: 67
consecutive status=failure rows, 0 tokens, twice daily, entirely silently. The
briefing had been rendering with no LLM pass at all. Nothing alerts on
status=failure in the spend logs, so it took an unrelated question about
reranker VRAM to surface it.

It was also pinned to NEVERMORE_RERANK_MODEL=qwen3-reranker -- the incumbent
Brokkr R43 measured harming 80/90 fleet queries -- and was its ONLY caller,
while the production `reranker` alias sat at 0 calls for 4 days. The R43
cutover repointed the alias but never moved the consumer.

  nevermore/.env  LLAMA_SWAP_MODEL       granite-4.1-8b -> summarizer
                  NEVERMORE_RERANK_MODEL qwen3-reranker -> reranker
                  (server-only; .env is excluded from the mirror both ways)

Verified against nevermore's exact call shape: summarizer returns clean content
with 0 reasoning chars at temperature 0.2 / max_tokens 4000; reranker scores
0.95 on-topic vs ~1e-5 off-topic; embedding returns dim-1024.

Retired alongside it:

  vllm-rerank    :8002  Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B + the qwen3-reranker alias
  vllm-rerank-a4 :8014  gte-reranker-modernbert + its alias
  vllm-granite   :8004  Exited 8 days, dead service block

and vllm-rerank-a3 was promoted from a throwaway `docker run` into this stack
(the selection ledger's own open follow-up). Healthy in 55s. It keeps the
bake-off arm name so the ledger, memory and R43 record stay valid.

VLLM_VERSION is pinned latest -> v0.24.0. Every service in the stack shares that
one variable, so a bare `compose up -d` could have silently upgraded all of
them at once; both tags resolved to the same local image (4091d5593f77), so the
pin changed nothing at runtime.

GPU1 is down to 81,448 of 97,887 MiB -- 13.9 GB reclaimed tonight.

Correction: an earlier claim that A4 had no gateway alias was wrong. It did.
LiteLLM serves both config-defined and DB-defined models -- live showed 32
against config.yaml's 26 -- and grepping the file cannot see the difference.
/v1/models and /model/info (which flags db_model) are the ground truth. DB
models delete hot via POST /model/delete with no restart.

Left alone: reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3, a zero-call duplicate of `reranker` on the
same backend. It is Brokkr's cutover-verification handle -- redundant rather
than broken, and another agent's tooling is not mine to delete unilaterally.

stacks/vllm/.env.example

@@ -4,12 +4,19 @@
 #   # edit .env with real values
 #   docker compose up -d
 
-# Image version — pin for reproducibility (`latest` for edge)
-VLLM_VERSION=latest
+# Image version — PINNED. Do not put `latest` here: every service in this file
+# shares this one variable, so a bare `docker compose up -d` would silently
+# upgrade the whole stack's vLLM at once. Pinned 2026-08-20 to the version all
+# seats were already running (`latest` and `v0.24.0` were the same local image,
+# 4091d5593f77, so the pin changed nothing at runtime). Bump deliberately.
+VLLM_VERSION=v0.24.0
 
 # Host ports (container always listens on 8000 internally)
 EMBED_PORT=8001
-RERANK_PORT=8002
+# 8013 — the reranker moved here 2026-08-20 when bge-v2-m3 (the R43 winner, which
+# had been running as a throwaway `docker run` on this port) was promoted into
+# this stack and the Qwen incumbent on :8002 was retired.
+RERANK_PORT=8013
 REWARD_PORT=8003
 
 # GPU assignment — all services share this GPU
@@ -18,7 +25,10 @@ GPU_ID=1
 
 # Models — reference by full repo name in API requests
 EMBED_MODEL=Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B
-RERANK_MODEL=Qwen/Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B
+# bge-reranker-v2-m3 — the R43 bake-off winner, replacing Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B
+# (measured HARMING 80/90 fleet queries). Multilingual cross-encoder; needs no
+# --hf-overrides, unlike the Qwen reranker it displaced.
+RERANK_MODEL=BAAI/bge-reranker-v2-m3
 # Skywork is a local-path AWQ output, not from HF Hub. Bind-mounted into the
 # reward container at /local-models — see compose.yaml. No env var here for
 # the model path itself since it's hard-coded in the compose command.
@@ -72,62 +82,12 @@ API_KEY=
 # services (embed/rerank). Reward is local-path, ignores this.
 HF_TOKEN=
 
-# === granite-4.1-8b (production summarizer / dreaming agent) ===
-# Replaced phi4-mini 2026-06-05 (Granite 4.1 8B beat phi4 on precision in
-# brokkr's R15 P03 model-fitness eval). Same GPU-1 slot, reusing phi4's port.
-GRANITE_PORT=8004
-# GPU 1 — co-located with the embed/rerank/reward trio. With phi4 retired, GPU 1
-# has ~19 GB free; granite at 56K + FP8 KV needs ~15-16 GB → ~2-3 GB margin.
-# NOTE: llama-swap also uses GPU 1 dynamically — a large swap-in could contend;
-# pin llama-swap to GPU 0 for clean separation (follow-up).
-GRANITE_GPU_ID=1
-# Official IBM pre-quantized FP8 (compressed-tensors) — calibrated, ~9.6 GB,
-# loaded directly (FP8 native on Blackwell cc 12.0). Fallback to vLLM-native dynamic FP8
-# from BF16: GRANITE_MODEL=ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b + GRANITE_QUANT=fp8.
-GRANITE_MODEL=ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b-fp8
-GRANITE_QUANT=compressed-tensors
-GRANITE_SERVED_NAME=granite-4.1-8b
-# 131072 ctx — MAXED 2026-06-13 (was 51200/50K). GPU-1 rebalance: granite shares
-# the card with the trio + qwen35-vl (vision). Qwen was over-provisioned on KV
-# (20x conc @ 32k), so trimming it freed room for granite's ~305k-token pool here.
-# PagedAttention allocates KV per ACTUAL token, so 131072 is only a CEILING — a 1k
-# summarize turn uses ~1k tokens, so the pool holds ~300 concurrently; the "2.33x"
-# headline is worst-case (every request maxing 131k). Granite 4.1 supports 131072.
-# 65536 — REDUCED 2026-06-14 (was 131072) to free GPU-1 room for the FP8 vision
-# model (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, stacks/qwen36-vl, ~34 GB weights). Summarizer load is
-# short parallel calls, so the 64K cap is ample.
-# 131072 — RESTORED 2026-07-16 (native max) for full-chapter summarization; GPU-1
-# freed by the image-bench evict + qwen36-vl gone, so the 128K ctx fits again.
-# 16384 — SHRUNK 2026-07-27 (operator: granite is being phased out) to free GPU-1
-# room for vllm-coder (the Zed FIM seat). Full-chapter ctx dropped; util 0.13 holds
-# 16K cleanly (32768 @ util 0.12 crash-looped: KV est-max was only 19376 tokens).
-GRANITE_MAX_MODEL_LEN=16384
-# FP8 KV cache (native on Blackwell cc 12.0). At 50K ≈ ~4.2 GB (vs ~8.4 GB at fp16).
-GRANITE_KV_CACHE_DTYPE=fp8
-# util 0.35 (~33.6 GB) — tuned 2026-06-13 to leave ~3.5 GB free on GPU 1 alongside
-# the trio + qwen co-tenants. On this shared card vLLM needs free >= util*total at
-# startup, and START ORDER matters: trim qwen FIRST, then grow granite, else granite
-# OOMs against the full card. (0.37 overshot to 1.7 GB free; 0.35 lands ~3.7 GB.)
-# 0.24 — REBALANCED 2026-06-14 (was 0.35) for the FP8 vision cutover. GPU-1 budget:
-# qwen36-vl 0.46 + granite 0.24 + reward 0.10 + embed/rerank 0.03 ≈ 0.90 total,
-# ~7.5 GB headroom (the OOM buffer; held under 20-concurrent load test). granite
-# gets a 169K-token KV pool = 2.58x concurrency @ 64K. Bring qwen36 up LAST.
-# 0.18 — RIGHT-SIZED 2026-07-16 (was 0.34 live; qwen36-vl no longer a GPU-1 tenant,
-# image-bench evicted) to free ~10.5 GB for relocating a GPU0 model onto GPU1. KV
-# 6.45 GiB = 84,528 tokens = 1.29x concurrency @ 65536 (summarizer = short parallel
-# calls; ample). Effective slope on this shared card ≈ 950 MiB KV per 0.01 util, and
-# KV must hold >= 1x max-model-len — util 0.15 undershot (crash: est max-len 47184 <
-# 65536), 0.18 lands the target cleanly.
-# 0.27 — RE-GROWN 2026-07-16 (same session) after char-rp moved onto GPU-1: spend the
-# leftover room on full-chapter context (max-len 131072). KV 15.0 GiB = 196,560 tokens
-# = 1.50x @ 131072; GPU-1 lands ~6.7 GB headroom (char-rp 30 + granite 27 + selene 17 + trio).
-# 0.13 — SHRUNK 2026-07-27 (was 0.27) with the max-len drop; frees ~14 GB on GPU-1 for
-# vllm-coder. granite phasing out, so no longer worth the big KV pool. (0.12 was too
-# small for even 16K KV; 0.13 gives ~1.4x @ 16384.)
-GRANITE_GPU_MEM_UTIL=0.13
-# Concurrency cap. Was 1024 (fan-out summarizer); DROPPED to 256 on 2026-07-27 with the
-# phasing-out shrink (256 is ample for the reduced summarizer load; smaller sched state).
-GRANITE_MAX_NUM_SEQS=256
+# === granite-4.1-8b — RETIRED 2026-08-12, vars removed 2026-08-20 ===
+# Was the production summarizer. The `summarizer` / `classifier` gateway aliases
+# were repointed at the gen seat and the container stopped; the service block and
+# these tunables are now gone. See the tombstone in compose.yaml for the lesson
+# this cost us (nevermore stayed pinned to the dead `granite-4.1-8b` alias and
+# failed silently for 8 days).
 
 # Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B (BASE) — FIM code-completion seat for Zed editor inline
 # edit-predictions (deep-research pick 2026-07-27, Apache-2.0). GPU-1, alongside the
@@ -143,17 +103,8 @@ CODER_KV_CACHE_DTYPE=fp8
 CODER_GPU_MEM_UTIL=0.06
 CODER_MAX_NUM_SEQS=32
 
-# LFM2.5-2.6B — NON-PRODUCTION bake-off alias vs granite (brokkr R-target 2026-08-10).
-# LiquidAI LFM Open License v1.0 (<USD 10M-rev commercial, not OSI) — eval-only pending
-# an operator production ruling. Reasoning model (emits <think>); served raw (no vLLM
-# reasoning-parser) so content is non-empty. util 0.09 (~8.6GB) fits GPU1's free slack
-# without touching production reservations; max-len 16384 keeps KV small (bake-off
-# doesn't need the 131k ceiling). Vendor sampling lives in the LiteLLM alias.
-LFM25_PORT=8021
-LFM25_GPU_ID=1
-LFM25_MODEL=LiquidAI/LFM2.5-2.6B
-LFM25_SERVED_NAME=lfm2.5-2.6b
-LFM25_MAX_MODEL_LEN=16384
-LFM25_KV_CACHE_DTYPE=auto
-LFM25_GPU_MEM_UTIL=0.09
-LFM25_MAX_NUM_SEQS=8
+# === LFM2.5-2.6B — RETIRED PERMANENTLY 2026-08-20 (operator directive) ===
+# Eval-only bake-off seat vs granite-4.1-8b that never got its production ruling;
+# its comparator was retired first, and it logged 0 calls in the 4 days before it
+# came down. Container removed, service block and tunables deleted, gateway alias
+# dropped. Weights remain in the shared HF cache.