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Clayton Kim ad33b1cb97 Codex CLI joins the climb; cheapest converger is haiku-4-5 at cap 6
FINDING: the cheapest model that recovers macro structure under the climb
is claude-haiku-4-5 -- it converges in 5 rounds given --max-rounds 8 (was
capped-at-1-residual at cap 4; one round short, not a hard ceiling). On the
GPT side only the frontier (gpt-5.5) converges; gpt-5.4-mini oscillates
(trajectories 4->1->5->2 at cap 4 and 3->3->2->1->6->2->1->5 at cap 8) and
never reaches clean. "Cheap tiers partially recover" was model-dependent,
not a property of cheap: read the two families separately.

Codex CLI as the GPT-side generator (OpenRouter still 402-blocked):
evals/model_generate.py gains a `codex` kind. codex exec is an agent CLI
whose stdout is an interleaved transcript, so call_codex extracts ONLY the
final message via -o/--output-last-message (verified clean by hand), runs
read-only/ephemeral, and wraps the call in its own process group with a
hard timeout that SIGKILLs the group -- the known silent-hang failure mode
becomes an honest failed round. CLIMB-07 gates the extraction and the hang
kill offline against a fake codex binary (evals/fixtures/climb/fake_codex.py).

All four live runs (gpt-5.5 cap 4 converged 4->1->1->0; gpt-5.4-mini caps 4
and 8 capped; haiku-4-5 cap 8 converged 1->1->1->1->0) preserved every
source fact every round, on the same SKILL-MACRO-01 fixture and settings as
the recorded matrix. pipeline.md's climb section gains the follow-up table
and the cheapest-viable doctrine; the tiering row and PRODUCT.md bullet
updated to the model-dependent reading.

Gates: adversarial 469 pass / 1 documented xfail (CLIMB-07 new), schema,
gates-doc, taboo parity, build --check, strict-leakage all green; 0 scanner
hits (hard or soft) on both edited docs. Behavioral tune: 33/34 tasks ran;
the one failure was a transient API server error mid-response on
SKILL-MACRO-01/with_skill (runner infra, not a model answer), which aborted
the non-blocking judge step.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01K6CYksdLbXbTAxcAQjvHz5
2026-07-07 14:04:15 -07:00
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