Cheat sheets¶
Compressed, printable, opinionated. Each page is one page: a framework you can hold in your head, a checklist you can run under pressure, or a decision you can defend in a review.
These are not summaries of the notebooks. They are the shapes that were left over after the measurements were done — the things worth carrying to a corpus that is nothing like this one.
Frameworks — mental models¶
Named so you can reach for them mid-conversation.
| Framework | The question it answers | |
|---|---|---|
| 🧭 | The Four Verdicts | Where did this answer actually fail? |
| 🔬 | The Precondition Test | Should I adopt this technique at all? |
| 📏 | The Noise Band Ladder | Is this delta real? |
| 📶 | The Stage Gradient | Which stage is the bottleneck now? |
| 🧊 | The Cost Iceberg | What does this system actually cost? |
| 🔒 | The Inference Channel Audit | Can someone learn what they cannot read? |
| ⚖️ | The Calibration Triangle | Can I trust this judge? |
| 🪞 | The Reranker Mirror | Will this second stage add anything? |
Playbooks — run these under pressure¶
| Playbook | When | |
|---|---|---|
| 🚨 | Retrieval incident runbook | Quality dropped and nobody knows why |
| 📅 | First 30 days on a RAG engagement | You have just been handed a client and a promise |
| 🧾 | Design review checklist | Someone is about to present an architecture |
| 🚦 | Release gate playbook | Deciding whether a change ships |
| 🔄 | Encoder migration playbook | Swapping the embedding model without an outage |
Interviews¶
| Sheet | Use it | |
|---|---|---|
| 🗺️ | Navigating the loop | Before the day — what each round is scoring |
| 🔍 | The question decoder | What they are actually asking |
| 🚩 | Red flags you emit without noticing | The sentences that cost you the round |
| 📐 | Numbers worth memorising | The handful you should be able to produce cold |
How to use these¶
Learners: read the framework, then find the exercise that makes you use it. Every framework page ends with the exercise and the discussion thread where it was argued out.
Practitioners: the playbooks are the transferable part. They assume nothing about this repository and everything about the failure modes it documents.
A warning about cheat sheets in general. A compressed framework is a prompt for thinking, not a substitute for it. Every page here names the condition under which it does not apply, because a mental model you cannot falsify is a superstition with better formatting.