Okay, so specialized decision models are becoming the rage.
Bespoke Labs just released Nimble, an open 9B decision model built from Qwen3.5-9B.
And apparently they built it in ONE DAY.
The recipe:
🧠 Qwen3.5-9B
🎯 LoRA fine-tune
📚 only 2,676 training examples
❌ no Jev distillation
❌ no RL
✅ open model
✅ open data
✅ open training recipe
Instead of generating explanations or JSON, Nimble scores the allowed answers:
YES / NO → A / B / C → route 1 / 2 / 3 → severity 1–5
Then returns the choice + probabilities.
Example of Bespoke's 324-example held-out test:
Qwen3.5-9B → 66.36%
Qwen3.8-27B → 84.88%
🔥 Nimble-9B → 90.12%
Jev → 93.21%
And because it isn't generating a bunch of tokens:
⚡ ~106 ms median on H100
🍎 ~444 ms median on an M5 Pro 64GB 👈 👀
🎯 So this is the key, giant reasoning model doesn't need to answer every tiny agent decision.
Let the big model think, then let a small local model handle the ...
🛠️ tool selection
🧭 routing
✅ verification
🚨 policy decisions
📊 scoring
🔄 retry / stop
Fast. Local. No API call.
⚠️ Bespoke says this is a narrow synthetic 324-example evaluation, NOT a standardized System One benchmark.
🔗 GH: /bespokelabsai/nimble