I recorded a Short because “54.8%” is the kind of number that gets pasted into a deck without context. The walkthrough exists to show where that metric comes from and why it should not be used as a headline.
Concrete detail: the percentage is computed only over runs where the pipeline finished inside the retry budget. Runs that exhausted retries are not counted as failures; they are moved into a separate bucket, so the success rate looks cleaner than the end-to-end experience. In the video I replay one real run where the first attempt stalls, the second recovers, and the final score still lands in the good-looking denominator.
The cost to me as the operator is time spent un-tricking people. Every time someone quotes 54.8% back to me as proof the thing “mostly works,” I have to explain the denominator, the retry budget, and the excluded tail. That is slower than shipping, but cheaper than letting a misleading metric become the spec.
If you want the full explanation, the walkthrough is here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p7bcHcFtryk
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