Introduce a new pre-experimental status tier, `incubating`, for composes that
work but aren't ready for the actionable list — niche specialists or models
that fail the standard functional gate by design. Incubating composes are
HIDDEN from `switch.sh --list` by default (revealed by `--list --all`) and
launch-gated behind `--force` (non-functional), so a half-validated model is
catalogued and discoverable without cluttering the recommended set.
Tier wiring (reuses the existing status plumbing — no new emit column):
- compose_registry.py: `incubating` in STATUS_VALUES + `🐣` in COMPOSE_STATUS_EMOJI
(stays out of FUNCTIONAL_STATUSES → --force-gated, never auto-defaulted)
- switch.sh: both --list filters skip incubating unless --all, with a
`(+N incubating hidden — --all)` header note
- AGENTS.md: Status enum row + Caveats-required references
- docs/ADDING_MODELS.md: new rule — NEW MODELS START at 🐣 Incubating, promote
up the enum (🐣 → 🧪 → ⚠️/✅) as they earn the actionable list
First occupant — VibeThinker-3B (WeiboAI, Qwen2 dense reasoning fine-tune):
- `vllm/vibethinker-3b-single` — bf16 weights + fp8_e5m2 KV, single 3090,
full 131072 ctx, mem_util 0.40 (~9.8 GB, single-concurrency sized),
--reasoning-parser qwen3, no tool-calling
- Live-validated 2026-06-16: serves clean correct reasoning/code (~110 TPS),
qwen3 parser splits <think>. fp8 WEIGHTS rejected (break the quant-sensitive
3B: non-terminating empty output). Always-reasoning + no-tools → fails
verify-full's fixed-small-budget checks (5/9) by design → incubating, not gate-passing.
Guard suite 47/47 green (nex-n2-mini parked aside; it's an unrelated local experiment).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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