Nikhil Pujari

Dev is an open-source 399M parameter bidirectional decision model built on ModernBERT-large. It is purpose-built for unstructured-to-structured classification—including ticket routing, yes/no verification, and rating scales—executing in a single forward pass (~28ms on MPS) without token generation. Following Jev (TypeSafe) and Kev-0.5B (Jared Palmer), Dev tests a fundamental architectural question: What if decision models shouldn't be causal decoders at all, but native bidirectional cross-encoders? Evaluated against Jared Palmer's kev-0.5b (built on a frozen Qwen-2.5-0.5B causal backbone + 9.3M LoRA pointer head): Inference Latency: Dev-0.4B executes in 27.6ms on Apple Silicon MPS (M1 Max)…