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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