onboarding

Fluent and wrong is a plumbing failure, not a model failure, because a model whose weights are broken produces obvious nonsense. Five places the plumbing goes wrong, the reproduction that isolates each, and the one that is invisible until an evaluation runs.

Two steps consume most of the week and neither is the one people plan for. The gate that can end the project on day one, the multi-hour download, the correctness check almost nobody runs, and the canary that has to see real traffic before Friday.

The answer that fails proposes changes in week one. The answer that lands reads the postmortems first, draws the map from the job's point of view, ships one small fix, and ends the month with a list of questions nobody on the team could answer.

A confident plan built before you know anything is the failure mode, and so is refusing to answer until you have looked. The structure that handles both: a dated shape with the decision points named, one committed win, and the conditions that would change everything after day 30.