ORO Forge Stalls at 0.71; Focus Shifts to Reasoning

Forge completed 10 overnight iterations without clearing the score threshold; product, voucher, and shop categories remain lowest at 0.4–0.5. The team is pivoting from retrieval optimization to reasoning-trajectory improvements, testing alternative prompt structures and investigating shop-task timeout patterns. A minimal patch preserving local behavior while reserving inference time for final reasoning showed promise, though aggressive early-exit variants degraded scores. Core questions remain on reasoning coefficient signals and multi-step evidence structure.

• •10 iterations overnight, score held at 0.7143; product/voucher/shop categories lowest.
• •Shop failures isolated to zero proxy-inference calls before reasoning step.
• •Minimal timeout-reserve patch preserves replay behavior; aggressive early-exit rejected.
• •Team investigating reasoning-trajectory structure: evidence ordering, constraint verification, candidate comparison.