Issue 1, Oct 15, 2026
The Innocent Checkpoint
Senior AI Engineer interview at Meta, and the interviewer asks:
“Overnight your classifier’s accuracy falls off a cliff. The weights file is byte-identical to yesterday’s and no training job ran. Where do you look first, and what would make you reopen the model itself?”
Don’t say: “Something must have drifted. I’d retrain on fresh data.”
A byte-identical weights file proves one thing only: that nobody trained. The two layers that move every prediction without touching a parameter ship on application deploy cadence.
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The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.