diff --git a/hw/dixie/default.nix b/hw/dixie/default.nix
index ebb45e4..ac3f0e4 100644
--- a/hw/dixie/default.nix
+++ b/hw/dixie/default.nix
@@ -40,6 +40,11 @@ let
     ; web_extract) for all agents and Honcho's deriver/summary/dream model.
     [ornith-1.5-9b-uncensored]
     model = ${modelsDir}/ornith-1.5-9b-uncensored/Ornith-1.5-9B-uncensored.Q4_K_M.gguf
+    ; serves the deriver, all dialectic levels and three agents' approval guardians at once:
+    ; 4 slots over one 48k pool (at 2 x 16k, concurrent deriver + dialectic hit "failed to find
+    ; free space in the KV cache" and stalled)
+    ctx-size = 49152
+    parallel = 4
     ; Runaway guard carried over from straylight: helper tasks need short answers.
     reasoning-budget = 2048
     n-predict = 4096
@@ -52,10 +57,9 @@ let
     top-k = 20
     min-p = 0
 
-    ; Honcho dialectic: non-thinking instruct model so answers are short and fast.
-    [honcho-dialectic]
-    model = ${modelsDir}/qwen3-4b-instruct-2507/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507-Q4_K_M.gguf
-    n-predict = 1024
+    ; honcho-dialectic (Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507) retired 2026-09-22: fast but often wrong in a
+    ; dialectic benchmark, where the 9B answered correctly. All dialectic levels use the 9B now;
+    ; the 4B's VRAM went to the 9B's KV pool. File stays on the stick under qwen3-4b-instruct-2507/.
 
     ; Honcho embeddings (1024-dim; EMBEDDING_VECTOR_DIMENSIONS=1024 on rift).
     [honcho-embed]
@@ -175,8 +179,8 @@ in
     };
 
     systemd.services.llama-server = llamaService {
-      description = "llama.cpp router: helper tier (9B guardian/deriver, dialectic, embeddings)";
-      port = 11434; preset = llamaModelsIni; modelsMax = 3;
+      description = "llama.cpp router: helper tier (9B guardian/deriver/dialectic, embeddings)";
+      port = 11434; preset = llamaModelsIni; modelsMax = 2;
     };
     systemd.services.llama-vision = llamaService {
       description = "llama.cpp vision server (qwen3-vl-8b, on demand)";