Tagged instrumentation

2 pieces

• October 9, 2026 · 10 min read

  Score Each Stage or You Are Tuning Blind

  A multi-stage pipeline judged only on its combined output cannot tell you which stage contributed nothing. An extraction error, a dead retrieval branch, a fusion step absorbing an empty list and generation failing on good context all produce the same thin answer. Per-stage instrumentation means candidate counts per branch, per-stage scoring against a source-derived reference, and attribution before any improvement work starts.

• September 9, 2026 · 9 min read

  Two Paths Through the First Gate

  When nobody knows whether a critical fact is true, shape the engagement so that both answers lead to a working product. One monitoring project did not know whether a controller could be read at all, so it was structured to decode the controller directly if yes and to instrument the surrounding physical signals if no. Neither answer stranded the capital.