Lessons
Cross-cutting rules, each earned by an incident and each enforced by something other than memory. If you hire me, these five are what I bring on day one: prove the backup by restoring it, make every gate fail before you trust it, put anything that outlives a session in a workflow, gate on a property the good output cannot violate, and report every tier.
| Rule | The incident | Where it lives now |
|---|---|---|
| A green exit is not done | two corpora backed up nowhere under a green nightly; two converters exited zero having written nothing | backups drill weekly; gates check invariants |
| Gate on invariants, not symptoms | a symptom rule caught 2 of 79 over-expanded papers; one byte ratio caught 79 of 79 | corpus quality gate |
| Temporal or it’s a POC | a home-directory wipe killed every job started from a terminal | every multi-hour job is a workflow |
| Verify by attacking the gate | a router scored 15 of 15 tuned and 15 of 23 blind | tamper tests in every gate’s suite |
| Measure the endpoint, not the proxy | two runs compared at equal steps had not seen equal text | per-tier reporting, never aggregate-only |