Decision models stopped being an OpenAI feature today — Microsoft hosts one, H2O open-weighted one.
Top Signal
Decision models go multi-vendor: Microsoft ships one, H2O open-weights it
platform change
HN Front Page, r/LocalLLaMA
Microsoft-Decision-1 is a Foundry-hosted model built for the "decisions API" shape: you send a state plus typed questions (pick-one, yes/no, score) and get calibrated answers instead of prose you have to parse. The same day, H2O released H2O-Lightning-4B — Apache-2.0, 4B params — claiming the #1 open slot on JevBench, above Jev itself. Days after OpenAI's decisions API landed, the pattern now has both a big-vendor hosted option and a self-hostable one. Why it matters: most agent code fakes this today with JSON mode, retries, and regex over free text, and gets uncalibrated confidence it then treats as a probability. A typed decision endpoint is a drop-in replacement for the routing, classification, and gating layer of an agent loop — and at 4B you can run it locally on every step for near-zero cost. Do this: run both against your real routing prompts and measure calibration, not just accuracy.
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Fast Signals
Google open-sources ml-drift for GPU inference on consumer hardware
new tool
r/LocalLLaMA
google-ai-edge/ml-drift is a GPU-accelerated inference stack aimed at heterogeneous consumer and mobile GPUs rather than datacenter CUDA. If you ship on-device inference and have been stuck choosing between CPU fallbacks and vendor-locked runtimes, this is a third path worth benchmarking against llama.cpp's Vulkan backend.
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Qwen 3.8 Flash Next runs 21 tok/s on a 12GB RTX 3060
research to practice
r/LocalLLaMA
A GSQ-RCO IQ2_XS quant gets Qwen 3.8 Flash Next to ~21 tok/s on an RTX 3060 12GB plus 16GB of DDR4 — with no gate pruning and bit-exact expert math, which is the part that matters. The usual cheap-hardware posts trade correctness for throughput; this one claims not to. Worth replicating before you buy more VRAM.
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Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo cuts image gen to a few steps, open weights
new tool
r/LocalLLaMA
Qwen shipped a distilled Turbo variant of Qwen-Image 2.1 on Hugging Face, picked up in two independent r/LocalLLaMA threads within minutes. Few-step sampling is the difference between an image feature that feels interactive and one that needs a job queue — re-test your latency budget if you deferred in-product image gen.
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Deno joins Cloudflare, taking celld with it
platform change
Simon Willison
The Deno team is joining Cloudflare, two months after open-sourcing celld — their independent implementation of the Durable Objects pattern. Cloudflare now owns both the proprietary primitive and the only credible self-hostable clone of it, days after shipping an agent workspace and a search API on Workers. If celld is your escape hatch for stateful agents, watch its governance closely.
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Apogee rebuilds Mozilla's dead Orbit summarizer, fully local
new tool
HN Show
Mozilla's Orbit extension shipped page summaries to a GCP backend (including a store_result endpoint people found), then got discontinued. Apogee is a one-month solo rebuild that keeps inference local with no server. Useful as a reference implementation for a browser extension that does real LLM work without a backend to pay for or leak through.
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GLM 5.3 Flash tops Artificial Analysis' Cyber Index over Claude
emerging signal
r/LocalLLaMA
An open-weights model now leads a security-task index against the frontier closed models. Benchmark placement alone is noise, but a self-hostable #1 changes the calculus for anyone building security tooling that can't send code or logs to a vendor API. Verify on your own task set before believing the ranking.
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Simon Willison ships a real blog feature by voice, not keyboard
workflow
Simon Willison
Willison built and deployed his new Newsletters index page by dictating to an agent. It's a small feature, but it's a concrete write-up of voice-driven development on production code rather than a demo — worth reading for the prompt/review loop he used to keep the agent honest.
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Radar
artcraft: an "intentional crafting engine" for visual work
storytold/artcraft is trending as a generative tool built around deliberate, controllable composition rather than prompt roulette. Watch it if you're designing creative UX where the user needs to steer each step instead of rerolling.
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ttok 1.0 changes how stdin token counts default
Willison shipped 0.4 then immediately 1.0 after discovering the new version counted the wrong thing by default. If you script token budgets or cost estimates with ttok, pin the version and re-check your numbers.
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carrier-explode archives decoded phone carrier settings
A continuously updated archive of iPhone, Pixel, and Galaxy carrier configuration files, with decoders and explanations for common baseband settings. Niche, but the only public corpus of its kind — bookmark it if you ever debug mobile network behavior.
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Convergence Watch
decision models
TRENDING
2 mentions across HN Front Page, r/LocalLLaMA, Simon Willison
Third straight day across independent sources, now with two new implementations in one day — one hosted by Microsoft, one Apache-2.0 at 4B. A pattern that was an OpenAI API shape 48 hours ago is becoming a portable interface. Build against the shape, not the vendor.
cloudflare
TRENDING
1 mentions across Simon Willison
Third Cloudflare platform move in a week: agent workspace on Workers (10-04), Workers search API (10-05), now acquiring the Deno team and celld. Cloudflare is assembling a full agent runtime — edge compute, durable state, search — and absorbing the alternatives.
qwen3.8
TRENDING
1 mentions across r/LocalLLaMA
Fifth appearance in seven days, but the story has shifted from the model to the quants: today's item is a bit-exact IQ2_XS run on a 12GB card. Qwen 3.8 Flash Next is becoming the default local target the way Llama 3 once was.
local inference
TRENDING
2 mentions across r/LocalLLaMA
Google's ml-drift plus the 3060 quant run continue a two-week pattern: the frontier of local inference is no longer bigger rigs but better runtimes and quantization on hardware people already own. Cheapest capability gains right now are software, not GPUs.