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Issue #7 · WeeklyOct 16, 2026

Paper of the Week #7 — Told to Skip the Reasoning, It Kept Working in English and Mostly Stopped in Korean

This week's roundup. We gave Qwen3-8B the Thinking Inertia paper's "no reasoning, just the answer" instruction in English and in Korean: on 30 open-ended math questions it answered directly 0% of the time in English and 63.3% in Korean, where accuracy fell to 36.7%. Also: what a passing test guarantees, how much of an uncertainty score is answer length, agent cost tracking turns, who checks Lean's checkers, the conditions behind SSD-streaming speeds, decision models when their own server is at stake, three ways to write context down, and grading choices that reorder rankings.

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Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Hermes: How Many of the Eight Harness Parts Do They Open Up?

Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Hermes: How Many of the Eight Harness Parts Do They Open Up?

We compared four agent harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Hermes Agent) against the eight parts named in the Harness² paper, checking in each tool's official documentation whether a part is exposed as a file or setting, and opening some of the installed tools ourselves. In the docs we read, none of the four opens all eight.

- Models & Algorithms
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What Is an Agent Harness, and What Does Harness Engineering Do?

What Is an Agent Harness, and What Does Harness Engineering Do?

An agent is a model plus a harness: the prompts, rules, memory, tools and scripts around it. Where the term harness engineering comes from, the eight parts Google's Harness² paper edits, and what the practice looks like in a repository you already have.

- Models & Algorithms
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DeepSeek's Config Says 16 KV Heads, Its Cache Holds a Ninth of That: Seven Ways LLMs Handle Attention, and Which Models Use Each

DeepSeek's Config Says 16 KV Heads, Its Cache Holds a Ninth of That: Seven Ways LLMs Handle Attention, and Which Models Use Each

DeepSeek-V2-Lite lists 16 KV heads, which predicts 8,640 MiB of cache at 32K; llama.cpp allocated 972 MiB. A guide to MHA, MQA, GQA, sliding window, MLA, sparse attention and linear-attention hybrids: what each stores, which models use it (checked against their config.json), and what it gives up.

- Models & Algorithms
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Implementing the Attention Methods Used in LLMs: From Multi-Head Attention to Gated DeltaNet

Implementing the Attention Methods Used in LLMs: From Multi-Head Attention to Gated DeltaNet

MHA, MQA, GQA, sliding window, attention sinks, MLA with weight absorption, DSA-style sparse attention and Gated DeltaNet, each as a short PyTorch function with a check that it does what it claims. The MLA check runs on DeepSeek-V2-Lite's real layer-0 weights; the Qwen3.5-9B state size from the code matches llama.cpp's 50.25 MiB.

- Models & Algorithms
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Four Times the Context, Less Memory: How Six Models Store the KV Cache, Measured in llama.cpp and vLLM

Four Times the Context, Less Memory: How Six Models Store the KV Cache, Measured in llama.cpp and vLLM

In llama.cpp, Qwen3.5-9B with a 128K context allocated 4,146 MiB of KV cache; Qwen3-8B needed 4,608 MiB for 32K. We calculated the cache from config.json for six models with four kinds of cache (full attention, sliding window, MLA, linear-attention hybrid), measured it in llama.cpp and vLLM, and list what to plan with for each.

- Models & Algorithms
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llama.cpp vs vLLM: Deployment Methods and Strategies, Part 1: Memory

llama.cpp vs vLLM: Deployment Methods and Strategies, Part 1: Memory

Deploying the same models on llama.cpp and vLLM, part 1: memory. What each runtime reserves for the KV cache and why (Gemma 3 4B at 32K: 814 MiB against 2,682 MiB), the settings that move it (-ub, --swa-full, max_num_batched_tokens, prefix caching), and four other differences: lengths past training, --parallel, GGUF conversion and vLLM's startup kernel build.

- Models & Algorithms
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