R36 gate (2026-07-14) validated NEO-CODE ships on all axes: tool-calling 0.967
(attach_tool 1.00, 0 runaways — #355 eliminated), prose genre-artifact-fine
(less clichéd than gen), refusal uncensored-as-spec + CSAM-clean.
#355 root cause was MODEL-level, not the reasoning-budget-forcing bug: Deckard
emitted Qwen's native qwen3_coder XML tool format malformed -> llama.cpp leaked
the closing tags into the arg value -> Bifrost attach_tool schema error -> retry
-> reasoning runaway to max_tokens. NEO-CODE emits the same native format cleanly
on the same seat/parser -> no schema error -> no runaway. The fix was the model
swap; there was never a wrong parser (the XML is Qwen3.5/3.6-native).
- reasoning seat: Deckard-PKD (Qwen3.5) -> NEO-CODE=Heretic2-Thinking (Qwen3.6-27B) Q5
- samplers: card defaults (temp 1.0 / top_p 0.95 / top_k 20 / min_p 0.0), DRY dropped
- ctx: 256K max; custom llama.cpp kept (qwen3_coder parse + PR#25544 belt-and-suspenders)
- persistent-memory ACTIVE 1 marked resolved
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