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principle-explain-the-number

Apply whenever a measured speedup, regression, throughput, latency, or eval score is about to be reported or acted on. Identify what caps the number and exclude the readings in which it reflects something other than the work you meant to measure.

plugins/requie/endostack/skills/principle-explain-the-number/SKILL.md

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# Explain the number

A measurement earns trust only once you can say what caps it and have excluded the explanations in which it captures something other than the intended work. Do both before reporting it or acting on it.

## When it applies

Any measured performance or evaluation result that is about to go into a reply, a PR description, or a decision. Speedups, regressions, throughput, latency, and eval scores all qualify, including attack success rates from a red-team suite.

It does not apply to numbers that are not measurements, such as a count from a deterministic query or a config value.

## What to do

1. Ask why the result is not twice as good, and name the specific thing that limits it, such as one CPU core, a lock, disk I/O, network bandwidth, or the load generator. Take that answer from profiler output or from system counters recorded during the run, then trace it to the responsible source code. A guess from reading code does not count; an unnamed limiter means the measurement is not understood.
2. List alternative explanations and eliminate each with evidence. Check these every time: errors during the run, work that was skipped or served from cache, code that never executed, one side left on default settings while the other was tuned, noise, and a component too small to move the end-to-end result.