Brummel
ded28e2f75
Ran the two core formats (plain Form-A, annotated parens) on Llama-3.1-405B (405B dense, ~135x Qwen3-Coder-Next's 3B active) to separate format-effect from small-model-effect. Scripts parametrized by PROBE_MODEL/PROBE_TAG (Qwen default preserved). Watch-out caught: Llama-3.1 on IONOS leaks its chat template (repeats "assistant", generates endless variants to max_tokens — an IONOS-documented quirk). First run read 0/8; that was the instrument. Fixed with a stop sequence and a balanced-first-module extractor. Result reverses the effect: Qwen3-Coder (3B): plain 6/8, annotated 7/8 Llama-405B (405B): plain 7/8, annotated 6/8 Llama solves L4 (Qwen's bracket wall) with plain parens, so that wall was a small-model effect. Annotated parens help the small model and hurt the large one (at L1 Llama invented a spurious (lit 3) wrapper under the annotated dialect). Both still fail L7 (SMA) — a genuine complexity ceiling. Synthesis: redundant explicit structure is a crutch for weak models. A frontier model tracks plain brackets fine and the unfamiliar scaffolding only adds noise. The right surface is model-relative. Synthesis in format-findings.md; raw ladders llama405-*.md.