Runs of one prompt share most of their content: on a real 21-run session, 86% of
each descriptor was the part every run had. Comparing raw vectors measured that
shared part, so every distance came out near zero and near equal — mean cosine
0.97, and no separation at ANY bucket including the late ones where steering
demonstrably works.
Centring first flips the same data from -0.002 (backwards) to +0.03 and p 0.83
to 0.11, consistent across all four buckets. Not significant at 5 good / 16 bad,
but pointing the right way and now limited by sample size rather than by the
statistic.
The descriptor was not at fault. adaptive_avg_pool1d over the flat latent keeps
512 REGIONAL means, not one global mean, and it distinguishes clips fine.
Also: the prompt id is quantised before hashing. Raw bytes answered "are these
bit-identical", so any value crossing a rounding boundary changed the id — one
prompt produced 20 distinct ids across 21 runs. Stable now for jitter of the
size a GPU produces; no exact hash of floats can do better.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
