deepseek_v3 400s on this checkpoint: "could not locate tool call start/end tokens in the tokenizer". unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B is a Qwen2.5 base distilled on R1 reasoning traces -- it kept R1's <think> format but never got DeepSeek-V3's own special tool-call tokens registered in its tokenizer. hermes parses from text patterns instead of special tokens, so it works against the underlying Qwen tokenizer.
pi sends tool_choice="auto" for every session (Read/Bash/etc.) -- vLLM 400s on that without --enable-auto-tool-choice and a --tool-call-parser. Verified this deployed vLLM v0.11.0's registered parsers directly; deepseek_v3 matches, same family as the deepseek_r1 reasoning-parser already set (this Qwen-base distillation still emits DeepSeek's own tool-call format).
reasoning keeps its 2 GPUs untouched. verifier's freed GPU goes to a second ornith replica instead of a standalone qwen-only pod -- both replicas load ornith:35b + qwen2.5:3b-instruct, k8s Service load-balances across them, so 2 concurrent implementer-style calls get independent instances.
Frees verifier's GPU from an underused vLLM PRM deployment. qwen2.5:3b-instruct moves off ornith-predictor's shared pod onto its own dedicated GPU (grm.yaml), so verification/judge traffic stops contending with ornith:35b's agent traffic. /v1/qwen/chat/completions now points at grm-predictor; path unchanged.
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