§3.12. brokkr-smithy-dev caught and retracted his own recommendation mid-thread;
recording it before it reads back later as advice.
A common remedy for an overfit tune is a partial merge back toward the base to
recover general capability. The published recipes that recommend it merge into
the STOCK instruct checkpoint. On an abliterated base, following that literally
re-introduces the exact refusal directions the abliteration was run to remove —
and it is silent, because the merged model looks healthier on general benchmarks
while the property the seat exists for quietly returns.
Rule: any merge-back targets the SAME base the LoRA was trained against, never
the upstream stock weights however similar the name.
The wider lesson is about recipe-card provenance. Community cards are
per-checkpoint artifacts and do not transfer across dense-vs-MoE,
stock-vs-abliterated, or size variants. The worked example: a recommendation
carried from a card for a DENSE STOCK 31B onto a MoE ABLITERATED 26B-A4B on the
strength of a shared family name. The overfitting warning on that card happened
to come from the right architecture; the pipeline, reward stacks and merge-back
came from the wrong one. Same family, three axes apart.
So: before quoting a recipe card at a decision, state which checkpoint it was
written for and which axes differ. "Same family" is not an answer.
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