Quality Ratchet
A CI-enforced floor that only moves up. Once a quality metric hits a threshold, the system blocks any change that drops below it. Each improvement becomes the new minimum. The sequence of baselines is monotonically non-decreasing. Formally: a monotonic ratchet.
Why It Exists
Ship a 15% improvement on Tuesday. Regress to baseline by Friday. The ratchet makes this structurally impossible - the floor is enforced by CI, not by good intentions.
Rosetta Stone
Four circles, four readings of the same object. Each role reads the artifact through its own lens.
A covenant. A contractual floor on quality that only moves up. Prevents the common failure mode of one-step-forward, one-step-back.
The mechanism that makes Tuesday's 15% improvement stick. CI enforces the floor; Friday regressions get blocked, not argued about.
A CI floor on quality metrics. Same pattern as a coverage threshold - trip it and the PR does not merge.
A monotone ratchet on the quality functional. The sequence of baselines is non-decreasing; under the rejection rule the expected quality at time t+1 dominates quality at time t.
Related Terms
Gold Standard - A set of human-verified, ground-truth examples used to calibrate and evaluate AI output.
Oracle Gradient - The computed vector from your current performance toward the unobservable optimum in a domain's performance space.