Topic
Benchmarks, evals, and measuring capability.
Across 155 small-model experiments centered on Qwen 3.5 4B, the same thing kept working: give the model something executable it can check against the evidence it has, and it punches far above its benchmark weight. Here is the field guide — the levers that worked, how I know they're real, and the frontier they opened up.
Swapping the frontier model rarely moves your agent's success rate as much as fixing retries and context management — and the one thing competitors can't clone is your evaluation environment. A thesis on why agent evals, not weights, are where reproducible capability accrues.
The headline benchmark is the least durable thing in a model release. Here is how to read access, licenses, cards, eval protocols, and serving facts before you commit engineering to a number you cannot reproduce.
The standard behind everything we publish: the filters that decide what earns your attention, the reproduced-to-unverified ladder we grade claims on, how we handle benchmarks and weightless releases, and why every correction is dated and logged rather than silently edited.