decision-gates

Decision Gates

Get Explicit Approval For A Scientific Gate

Before adopting any scientific promotion, continuation, stopping, or retirement gate, present the exact:

• metric definitions and thresholds;
• comparison reference;
• independent denominator;
• aggregation;
• evaluation timing;
• the action triggered by pass and by fail;

and obtain explicit approval. Do not infer approval from a general experiment request, from prior autonomy, from a pilot, or from a similar gate used elsewhere.

Once approved and frozen for a run, preserve that gate and report it exactly. Any later interpretation or replacement is a separately versioned decision layer, not a retroactive edit.

A Mechanical Check Is Not A Gate

The acceptance criteria of a mechanical or developer check need no approval: a smoke that must reach a real kernel, a schema that must validate, a guardrail that must reject a known-bad input, a threshold below which a run is obviously not learning. Set those yourself and report the number.

If a criterion starts deciding whether something is promoted, retired, or continued, it has become a scientific gate and the approval rule applies again.

Check That The Gate Can Be Satisfied Before You Build For It

• Before building review, calibration, or reducer infrastructure, enumerate the maximum independent eligible cohort under the frozen source, split, availability, and contract rules, and prove it can satisfy every predeclared denominator gate. If any gate is mathematically unreachable, stop with typed feasibility evidence instead of building the downstream workflow.
• Before defining an identifiability or posterior-width gate, write the forward model with all fitted nuisance parameters and enumerate scale, shift, and permutation symmetries. Do not interpret a coordinate that a nuisance reparameterization leaves invariant.
• Before setting an automated QC coverage gate, compute the manual/reference ceiling under the same policy. If the reference itself can fail, report overall coverage against that ceiling and define any fixed pass fraction on the reference-eligible subset.