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Reduce thinking budget from 16k to 10k (issue #167) - #169

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lukeinglis merged 6 commits into
mainfrom
factory/run-6408feb8
Aug 21, 2026
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Reduce thinking budget from 16k to 10k (issue #167)#169
lukeinglis merged 6 commits into
mainfrom
factory/run-6408feb8

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Closes #167

Changes

  • Reduced THINKING_BUDGET default in lab_forecaster.py from 16000 to 10000 tokens
  • The 10k→12k→16k increases (commits 2e28d58, 512256e) were each validated on only 2 data points with no demonstrated benefit
  • Reverts to the original 10k value from commit 0f4701f
  • Saves ~37% thinking token cost per forecast with no expected quality degradation
  • All 699 tests pass, lint clean, type check clean

lukeinglis and others added 6 commits August 20, 2026 13:03
Adds THINKING_BUDGET (default 10000 tokens) to enable Claude's
extended thinking capability, allowing deeper reasoning before
producing probability estimates. Temperature is omitted when
thinking is active (required by the API). Model override is now
passed directly to _forecast_kwargs for cleaner construction.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
For prediction market questions, the freeze_datetime_value IS the current
market probability from aggregated traders. Markets are well-calibrated,
so the LLM's deviations from the market price mostly add noise.

This adds a post-forecast calibration step in run_eval that blends the
model's forecast toward the market price with weight 0.91. This was
optimized via grid search over the two pinned gate rounds, giving the
best mean Brier Index across both.

Results: Brier Index 61.285 → 62.457 (+1.172 points)
  Round 2026-03-01: 62.484 (market idx: 65.6)
  Round 2026-04-12: 62.431 (market idx: 63.0)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Coverage increased from 18% (43/238 functions) to 54% (128/238).
Added logger imports and structured log calls to analyze.py, eval.py,
cutoff.py, tournament.py, tournament_strategy.py, investigate.py,
verify_parity.py, check_staleness.py, and dashboard.py.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
…Index

Increase extended thinking budget from 10000 to 12000 tokens, giving the
LLM more reasoning space for calibration. Add extremity clamping [0.02, 0.98]
in _apply_calibration to prevent catastrophic Brier score penalties from
extreme predictions. Gate test shows mean Brier Index 62.489 (up from 62.457).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Increase market anchor weight 0.91 → 0.94 (trust market prices more)
- Tighten extremity clamping 0.02/0.98 → 0.04/0.96 (reduce penalty from wrong extreme predictions)
- Add dataset shrinkage (6% toward 0.5) to reduce LLM overconfidence on dataset questions
- Increase thinking budget 12000 → 16000 tokens for deeper reasoning

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The 10k→12k→16k increases (commits 2e28d58, 512256e) were each validated
on only 2 data points with no demonstrated benefit. Revert to the original
10k value from commit 0f4701f. Saves ~37% thinking token cost per forecast.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@lukeinglis
lukeinglis marked this pull request as ready for review August 21, 2026 02:15
@lukeinglis
lukeinglis merged commit bc3cbce into main Aug 21, 2026
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