My guess at the reward is one line: r = c - p_a. c is 1 if the sampled answer was correct, p_a is the probability the model assigned it. Say 0.9 and be right, earn 0.1. Say 0.9 and be wrong, pay 0.9. With p_a detached, REINFORCE on this is an unbiased estimator of half the gradient of the Brier score, from bandit feedback alone: the environment reveals only whether the action you took was right, never what the options you didn't take would have said.
Two runs, same warmup checkpoint, same 32,000 rows, same optimizer and learning rate. With the outcome-only reward r = c, confidence goes to 0.991 and Brier ends worse than the checkpoint it started from. With the subtraction, accuracy goes 0.748 -> 0.808 on held-out test, ECE stays 0.023, Brier drops 0.339 -> 0.267. The difference is one subtraction.
On the probe below (tickets with two equally cued departments, 0.5 the ideal), RLCD lands at 0.593 max probability while the outcome-only reward says 0.990. The reliability diagram tells the same story.
This is a 0.6B base model and 80 minutes on one consumer GPU. It says nothing about how TypeSafe trained Jev. It says the objective is coherent, and cheap to check.
Everything is open:
Training code, ablation, evaluation: https://github.com/anthony-maio/eve-rlcd
Decision-only checkpoint: anthonym21/qwen3-0.6b-rlcd-decision
Dataset, the exact bytes of every run (64k/8k/8k typed questions): anthonym21/rlcd-decision-v1
Full write-up: https://anthonymaio.substack.com/p/honest-about-uncertainty-i-tried