2 min lesson
Decompose into a driver tree
Explain your answer to "Why is a driver tree more useful than a standalone north-star number?" Add one concrete detail from the lesson.
Step 1 of 3
Decompose into a driver treethe north-star as a product of queryable inputs
A north-star you can only observe is hard to act on. A north-star you can decompose tells engineers exactly where to look when it moves. Break it into the harness stages that multiply into it.
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
The north-star is the product of these stage SLIs - not their average.
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Full explanation
Full explanation
“I'd give the family first: the north-star is the share of agent runs that reach an accepted edit within the latency budget over a rolling 7 days; the two guardrails are cost per run and p99 latency; the counter-metric is the false-accept rate of bad edits.”
A north-star with no counter-metric invites gaming. If "success rate" can be raised by making the agent answer less ambitiously, you have built an incentive to ship a worse product. Always pair the optimization target with the thing it would quietly sacrifice.
QAn interviewer asks you to propose a single reliability metric for the agent. What distinguishes a strong answer from a weak one?