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hyperframes/docs
Vance IngallsandClaude Opus 5 a7bb061afe feat(core): inert calibration canaries to validate the mechanism in the wild
Registers two canaries that gate nothing — `calibration-10` (10%) and
`calibration-50` (50%) — so the rollout mechanism can be proven against real
traffic before any real feature depends on it. Zero behavioural risk: they are
read by nothing.

They answer what the unit tests structurally cannot. The tests bucket
generated UUIDs and weight every install equally; real render volume is
heavily skewed toward a few heavy installs, and real install ids churn (~25x
more distinct ids over 30 days than in any single day on the desktop render
population).

Four checks, pre-registered in the docs so the read is not post-hoc:

1. ACCURACY — does 10% land at 10%, install-weighted AND event-weighted?
2. DRIFT — how fast does CUMULATIVE exposure climb above target as ids churn?
   The instantaneous share is flat by construction; the set of installs
   enrolled at some point is not.
3. STABILITY — does any install ever change cohort? Must be zero. Percentages
   are held FIXED for the window precisely so a flip is unambiguously a bug;
   during a real ramp a false->true flip would be correct instead.
4. CROSS-SURFACE — do the CLI and Studio bindings agree for the same install?
   A CLI-launched Studio adopts the CLI id, and 16,961 installs currently
   share an id across both surfaces, so this is measurable.

Plus an independence check: overlap between the two calibration canaries
should be ~p1*p2 (~5%), not ~min(p1,p2) (~10%, which would mean every canary
lands on the same unlucky cohort).

The docs also record what calibration CANNOT fix: per-install cohorts never
flip, but a person who wipes their config gets a new id and a fresh roll.
Preventing that needs stable identity across resets, and both candidates were
rejected — hardware fingerprinting correlates the cohort with hardware (fatal
for a rendering experiment, and it survives uninstall) and account identity
covers only ~3.6% of local rendering installs. The drift is therefore a
measured, accepted limit, and the point of calibrating is to size it and pick
canary window lengths accordingly.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-30 15:14:59 -07:00
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2026-07-30 10:38:10 -07:00