Proxy cap, K=5 stats — regex-log 5/5; openssl's misses are not budget-related (0.80)

What was run

The two signal tasks × 5 attempts each (10 trials) through the reasoning-cap proxy (port 8021, cap ~4000), qwen3.6-35b-a3b, thinking ON.

Results

Mean 0.80: regex-log 5/5, openssl-selfsigned-cert 3/5.

Interpretation

• The cap reliably fixes the reasoning loop — regex-log went from loops-and-fails (uncapped) to 5/5.
• openssl's 60% is not a budget problem: its whole trajectory is only ~1.7k–3.7k output tokens, so per-turn reasoning never even reaches the 4000 cap. That's the model's baseline on the task.
• Learned to judge the cap by pass rate, not by trajectory token totals — totals sum all turns and look scary even when each turn is bounded.

Next steps

More samples for tighter confidence (K=15), and try the dense 27B model through the same proxy.