arcodangeandClaude Fable 5
5aea83749d
Operator direction 2026-07-15: the orchestration layer itself (builder sessions, cold verifiers) must run on Mistral or hermes+Ornith/MLX too. The protocol already carries everything in files+issues; new model-fleet section defines the evidence-gated ladder — verifier roles migrate first (cross-family refutation is stronger verification), scoped builders benched on unchanged acceptance gates, Claude default until the bench says otherwise. D2 row records the direction; spike = erp#63. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
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vibe > PRD > AI back-office > Model fleet
Model fleet — four tiers, one routing policy
Status: In design Last Updated: 2026-07-11 Up: AI back-office hub Related: Agent architecture · Task inventory · POC plan
The four tiers
| Tier | Where | Availability | Assigned work | Data policy | Marginal cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pi SLM | k3s cluster (pi1–3, arm64), llama.cpp/Ollama server, quantized 1–4B | 24/7 (survives cloud + laptop outages) | T01 triage, T11 reminders, event detection, queue enrichment | everything stays in the lab | ~0 € (electricity) |
| M4 local | MacBook Pro M4 — the hermes runtime (local Ornith reasoning model, 127.0.0.1:18080) · Ollama/MLX 7–30B class |
when awake — opportunistic, never time-critical | T02/T16 sensitive extraction, T09 cash report, T17 vault capture/retrieval, second extractor, drafting | on-device; bank/contract/vault content never leaves | 0 € |
| Mistral (EU cloud) | La Plateforme API (Mistral Large/Medium class + OCR) | on-demand | second/independent extractor, OCR for scans, FR fiscal wording, volume overflow | EU residency; acceptable for business documents | cents/doc |
| Claude (frontier) | Claude Code + skills (interactive), Agent SDK / API (headless) | on-demand | business validation vs fiscal profile, manifest assembly, orchestration, escalations, T12 research, building the atoms themselves | prefer minimized/structured payloads; full docs only when the human says so | subscription + API cents |
Model candidates per tier (evaluate at POC time — the named models will age faster than this PRD): Pi → Qwen3 1.7B/4B, Gemma 3 1B/4B class GGUF Q4; M4 → already resident: Ornith served by hermes; candidates Qwen3 14B/30B-A3B, Mistral Small 3.x, Gemma 3 27B class (RAM-dependent); Mistral → current Large/Medium + dedicated OCR; Claude → current Opus-class frontier model. POC-5 produces the actual accuracy/latency/cost table; the registry's model_policy fields hold the outcome, not this page.
The second brain already declares its own routing doctrine — Claude by default · Mistral for well-defined tasks · Ornith/hermes local for the confidential — this fleet generalizes a policy the vault has been living by, it does not invent one.
Routing policy
Route by (sensitivity, complexity, stakes, availability) — in that order:
- Sensitivity floor: bank statements, contracts, anything with credentials → local tiers (M4/Pi) or EU cloud at most; escalation to Claude sends extracted fields, not raw documents, unless the human explicitly widens it.
- Complexity ceiling per tier: Pi handles closed-set classification and template rendering only; M4/Mistral handle structured extraction and drafting; ambiguity, multi-document reasoning, and anything touching the fiscal profile go to Claude.
- Stakes gate: any output that feeds a
write-*oroutboundatom must come from a tier that passed that atom's eval at the required accuracy — regardless of what cheaper tier "could" do it. - Availability fallback: each atom's
model_policylists an ordered fallback chain; the router degrades along it and flags the degradation in the journal (a result produced by a fallback tier is marked as such).
Escalation rules (mechanical, not vibes): confidence below the atom's threshold → next tier up; dual-extraction disagreement on critical fields → Claude; Claude uncertain → human review queue. Every escalation is journaled with its reason — escalation rates are a fleet health metric.
Structured output enforcement
The format guarantee never rests on the model:
| Tier | Mechanism |
|---|---|
| Pi (llama.cpp) | GBNF grammar / JSON-schema constrained decoding — a 1–4B model cannot emit malformed JSON |
| M4 (Ollama/MLX) | JSON-schema format constrained decoding |
| Mistral | JSON mode / function-calling schemas |
| Claude | tool-use schemas (forced tool choice) |
…and regardless of tier, every payload passes the same deterministic validators downstream (agent architecture). Constrained decoding guarantees shape; validators guarantee truth conditions (arithmetic, checksums, plausibility).
Harness portability
The atoms above are multi-model by construction. The harness — the orchestration layer that executes backlog issues (builder sessions), verifies them (cold readers, locate-tests) and files PRs — ran its first full loop on Claude (erp#38 → PR erp#62, 2026-07-15). Operator direction (2026-07-15): that layer must not have Anthropic as a hard dependency either — the same loop should run on Mistral, or on hermes + Ornith / MLX-served local models.
The protocol was built for this: everything an executing agent needs lives in files and issues — AGENTS.md orientation, per-issue Execution footers (first command, done-means), acceptance tests defined in the issue itself, deterministic validators around every output. Nothing load-bearing lives in a vendor's context window. Any runtime that can read the forge and run a shell can attempt an issue; the acceptance gates don't care who built the thing.
Migration ladder (evidence-gated like everything else — erp#63):
- Verifier roles first — locate-tests, cold-reader audits, refutation passes: bounded, read-only, cheap. Re-run the already-passed erp#38 locate-test on Ornith (hermes,
127.0.0.1:18080) and on an MLX-served candidate (Qwen3 14B/30B-A3B, Mistral Small 3.x class); require verdict parity with the Claude run. Once parity holds, prefer cross-family verification: a different model family refuting the builder is stronger evidence than the builder's family agreeing with itself. - Scoped builders benched — one small, tightly-footered issue (a #56-class fix) attempted end-to-end by a Mistral-driven runtime against the unchanged acceptance gates; measure completion rate and intervention count.
- Claude stays the default for multi-file builders, ambiguity and fiscal reasoning until the bench says otherwise — a routing-policy fact (complexity ceiling above), not an allegiance.
Degraded modes
| Outage | Keeps working | Queues | Lost until recovery |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud down (Anthropic + Mistral) | Pi triage, reminders, digests; M4 extraction when awake | writes awaiting business validation | escalations, T12 research |
| Laptop asleep/away | everything cloud + Pi | M4-assigned sensitive extraction (or reroute to Mistral if policy allows) | nothing time-critical (by design) |
| Cluster down | cloud tiers driven manually from the M4 | sentinel triage, reminders | 24/7 watching — operator falls back to the manual runbooks |
| ERP down | triage, extraction, drafting | all write-* and read-verify stages |
recording; restore runbook applies |
| Source or channel down (Zoho, a bank API, Telegram) | every other lane, all tiers | the affected lane parks; item age stays visible once the channel returns | that feed/channel — its manual fallback applies (C9: IMAP for mail, CSV export for banks, direct check-in replacing the digest) |
The quarterly game-day (QA strategy) exercises one of these on purpose.
Cost envelope
At current volumes (~30 relevant mails, ~5–10 supplier invoices, 1 client invoice, 4 recos, ≤1 fiscal event per month), cloud inference is single-digit euros per month — the 30 €/month budget in the success criteria is generous headroom, with an alert at 20 €. The honest framing: at Arcodange's scale, the local tiers are not a cost play — they buy resilience (24/7 sentinel through cloud outages), privacy (bank/contract content stays home), and institutional learning (operating SLMs is itself lab capital). The expensive resource is frontier-tier authoring of atoms (Claude Code sessions), covered by the existing subscription and amortized as each atom graduates to cheaper tiers.