Abstract: In September 2026, TypeSafe announced Jev as the first model in its System One category: unstructured state goes in, and typed, calibrated decisions that software can use directly come out. Jev's architecture and training data are unpublished, but many open typed-decision models have followed, including Nimble, the Decision 1.0–3.0 family and Clef. They answer structured questions about a piece of text, such as a yes/no check, a choice among labelled options or a graded score, by reading the text with a language model and scoring the options with a small readout. Each pairs a different readout with a different backbone, training mix and recipe, so it is unclear which design choices matter. We re-implement five readouts and train all of them under one protocol: the same backbone, the same 15 public English training sources, the same recipe with a per-head learning-rate sweep, and the same seed. Our experiments demonstrate that: The complexity of the head does not affect accuracy: on Qwen3-0.6B every readout reaches 81.3–82.0\% in-domain accuracy, and a 0.5M-parameter cosine head, which scores each option by its cosine similarity to the question, matches the 27M-parameter joint schema head adapted from Clef in-domain at half its inference time. Reading all of a text's questions from one prompt also matches one prompt per question in accuracy, with 1.6 times faster inference and 2.1–2.5 times faster training on one H100. The backbone's size matters more than either choice: moving from Qwen3-0.6B to Qwen3-4B adds 4 points in-domain and 11 points on held-out sources, while the base, instruct and thinking checkpoints of the same model tie. We recommend spending effort on the backbone and keeping the head minimal.
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Small Heads, Strong Decisions: A Controlled Study of Typed-Decision Models
