Test-corpus fixture ladder — every failure the fixtures actually hit¶

Status: Authoritative for what corpus v4 must add. Written 2026-07-14 at the end of the v3 speaker/ads arc; promoted out of docs/wip/ on 2026-09-27 because nineteen files cite it — fourteen e2e specs, the roster-golden SCHEMA.md and its fixture, a diarization unit test, and both e2e READMEs, one of which calls §B the authority on what v4 must add. A spec that much code defers to cannot live in a directory whose contract is "deleted when the arc ends".

Tracked by: #1189 (golden fixtures — one per show, real diarization + feed metadata + hand-labelled truth). Mid-roll house ads: #1188.

Read §B before changing a browser-suite mock and §G before touching the roster-golden fixtures — those are the two sections the citing code actually depends on.

Why this note exists¶

Every single bug in this arc was found by a human reading output, not by a test.

That is the finding. Not "we had bugs" — bugs are normal. The finding is that the suite was green through all of them, and stayed green while a corpus shipped with two sports reporters hosting a technology podcast and a lawsuit defendant speaking the words of a doctor he has never met.

So this note is not "add more tests". It is: what class of test would have caught each thing, and what we are still missing. The fixture ladder at the bottom is the proposal.

The failure taxonomy¶

A. Silent wiring — the component works, and is connected to nothing¶

The dominant class. In every case the code was correct, tested, and never reached.

what broke	how it announced itself
evidence align read `summary_provider` from args, never from the profile	silence — production grounded with a model no eval ever used
`model_copy` does not re-run validators, so eval cells lost their grounder	513 insights, 0 quotes
GI had no detected-person list, so `build_named_turns` never ran	every quote shipped `speaker_id: None`
`corroborate_guests` — thoroughly tested, never called by the pipeline	suite stayed green with the call deleted
GI invariants — thoroughly tested, never called by the stage	suite stayed green with the call deleted
registry raised `ValueError`, which `_resolve_profile` catches to mean "not a preset"	a typo would silently disable the whole registry
renaming `prod_dgx_only` → `experiment_dgx_only` dropped it out of a prefix match	empty enricher set — nine enrichers silently off, on the profile v3 was about to run
`surfaceable` — written by GI, read by nobody	unattributable insights published to the UI as somebody's opinion. Shipped by the same agent, one hour after writing the gate
the relabel tool wrote no `voice_type` at all	every voice gate INERT across the corpus. Two causes: never set, and `format_diarized_screenplay_with_offsets` rebuilds each segment dict and drops unknown keys — so setting it before formatting would have looked right and done nothing
the eval harness never passed `transcript_segments` to `build_artifact`	every voice gate dead in every eval run. The head-to-head that was about to decide prod-v3 would have scored a pipeline neither model would ever run under (2026-07-14)

What catches this: mutation testing (re-break the fix, does anything go red?) and wiring contracts that drive the real chokepoint rather than calling the unit under test. Both were added this arc. The registry and enricher cases were caught by tests that already existed and were red — see §F.

And the trap inside the cure — a guard that is not a guard. The first test written for the eval wiring bug asserted the source text of run_experiment.py mentioned gi_text. Under mutation it survived: replacing gi_text = raw_text if segments else text with gi_text = text — the exact bug — still passed, because the name was still there. A test that greps for a symbol proves the symbol exists, not that it carries the right value.

The fix was structural, not a better assertion: make the bug unrepresentable. build_artifact's text and its segments are one decision, so they are now returned by one call (gi_transcript_and_segments) and cannot be mismatched by a caller. Then all four mutations went red. When a guard survives its own mutation, do not sharpen the guard — remove the degree of freedom it was trying to police.

B. The most-trusted signal is the easiest one to poison¶

signal	why it was trusted	who exploits it
`_self_intros_by_voice` — "a voice that says I'm X is X"	the strongest per-voice evidence we have	an ad narrator, whose entire job is to read its own name aloud
the LLM speaker detector's name list	it returns `success: True`	qwen3.5:35b, naming Elon Musk as a speaker of an episode he is being sued in
"the host is the voice that opens the episode"	true of every podcast	the pre-roll ad, which opens it first
an interview cue in the description	that is how guests are introduced	an unbounded `.*?` gap, letting one cue introduce every name in the paragraph

The lesson generalises: whenever a heuristic is labelled "most trusted", ask what an adversary optimising for exactly that signal would look like. For speaker naming, the adversary is an advertisement — and it is already in the audio, in every episode, for free.

What catches this: adversarial fixtures where the trap and the real thing appear in the same input (tests/fixtures/speaker_detection_traps.yaml). A toy string with the cue next to the name passes any implementation, including the broken one.

C. Thresholds that don't survive contact with real data¶

Every one of these was a rule that was correct in spirit and wrong at the boundary.

rule	how it broke
QA span softmax computed within each window's top-k	every window claimed ~1.0 → `"Codex"` at `qa_score=1.000`, and `qa_score_min` gated on nothing
ad voice = "under 90s of talk, only at the edges" (absolute)	on a 3-minute fixture every voice is near an edge → the entire cast typed as advertising
ad voice = "zero turns outside the edge window"	pyannote mis-assigned one 2-second turn → the ad narrator was cleared, took a host slot, and the real co-host was pushed out and given the guest's name
co-host = "clears `CO_HOST_INTRO_SHARE` in the first 90s"	Hard Fork's second host carries 38% of the episode and does not clear it
host count capped by the number of host names available	with `known_hosts` empty the cap collapsed to one

Pattern: absolute thresholds break on scale; exact thresholds (== 0) break on noise. Prefer fractions of the thing itself (share of talk, fraction of a voice's speech at the edges), and always fixture both ends — the short episode and the noisy one.

D. Eval ≠ production¶

divergence	consequence
the eval dataset reads `.cleaned.txt`; production resolves `.adfree.txt`	the eval measured a transcript production never sees
the eval harness re-implemented the pipeline's provider wiring	its numbers could never match production, by construction
`prod-v2` (built by a commit that exists nowhere on this machine) used to answer questions about current code	conclusions retracted
the corpus-battle pilot compared gemini-on-v2-transcripts vs qwen-on-v3-transcripts	measured transcript × LLM together; cannot isolate the model. Its own `caveat` field says so
the eval harness never handed GI the diarized segments	the ad-drop, `surfaceable` and person-node gates were all dead in eval while live in production (see §A)
offsets belong to a string, not to a file	`char_start`/`char_end` index the RAW screenplay; eval preprocesses the text first. Feed GI the cleaned text with raw offsets and only 0–8% of segments still resolve — every voice lookup lands on whichever speaker the shift happened to hit

What catches this: a parity assertion — for every shipped profile, the resolved eval config and the resolved production config must agree on the stack. Exists now (TestEvalMatchesProduction). It does not yet cover which transcript variant is read. That is a gap.

The generalisation, and it is the sharpest lesson of the arc: the instrument must run the thing it is measuring. The eval was about to answer "is qwen good enough to rebuild the corpus" by scoring a pipeline with none of the quality gates that make the corpus good. Ad copy is written to be quotable — it is the most fluent, most confident false insight available — so an ungated harness does not merely omit the gate, it actively rewards whichever model hallucinates most eagerly on advertisements.

A mis-attributing gate is worse than an absent one. Hence the loader refuses segments whose offsets no longer resolve (>=95% must hit) rather than silently trusting them. A gate that is off is a known gap; a gate that is confidently wrong is a lie with a green check next to it.

E. Content contamination¶

thing	status
house ads / cross-promos — no sponsor language, so `_AD_PATTERNS` scores 0 hits	9 of 10 feeds miss their pre-roll. Fixed structurally in the roster (`_edge_ad_voices`), not by keywords
mid-roll house ads (`Jonathan Knight`, NYT Games, 7/10 episodes)	STILL OPEN — sits mid-episode, so the edge rule cannot see it (#1188)
`anonymize_speakers` missed titled speakers (`Dr.`, `Prof.`, `Sen.`)	the guests — the one name a summary must never parrot — leaked while the hosts were scrubbed
`cleaning_v4` anonymises speakers, which is right for summarisation and fatal for GI	GI attributed nobody, silently. `cleaning_v5` exists for this

E2. "Unnamed" is four different things, and collapsing them costs a genre¶

Every voice we could not put a name to used to render SPEAKER_NN. That single bucket hid a distinction the product depends on:

voice_type	what it means	renders as	grounded?	surfaceable?
`person`	a named human	the real name	yes	yes
`unidentified`	a real person nobody in the episode ever names — the vox-pop, the tape	"Unidentified speaker"	yes	no
`commercial`	an advertisement	"Advertisement"	never	no
`cameo`	a brief incidental voice	"Brief speaker"	yes	no
`unknown`	a person we FAILED to name	`SPEAKER_NN`	yes	no — and counted, because a defect that costs nothing gets fixed by nobody

Measured over 160 episodes / 9 shows: person 77.45% of talk, unidentified 17.57%, commercial 1.09%, cameo 0.37%, and unknown 3.52% — the honest defect number, no longer inflated by voices nobody could ever have named.

Why unidentified must stay grounded. On Planet Money and The Daily the tape is the story — 36–40% of the episode. Dropping unnamed speech outright would gut the narrated shows to protect them from a problem they do not have. So: a fact is still a fact and stays eligible for CONNECT; only a STANCE needs a name, because an unattributed stance is not a stance — nobody holds it and nobody can disagree with it.

And do not mint a Person for a non-person. 19.1% of the Person nodes in the shipped corpus (69 of 361) were named SPEAKER_NN. #1167 filtered them back out downstream — a mop, not a gate, and one that worked only because the id happened to be ugly. Give those voices a friendly label and it breaks. The roster already knows the voice is not a person; the graph must not be told otherwise.

Fixtures must cover: a narrated episode (host + tape + ad), so that dropping unidentified visibly guts it, and a SPEAKER_NN that must not become a Person node.

F0. The instrument invented the number¶

I reported that 5.8% of the corpus was "unambiguously recoverable" and set out to fix it. The diagnostic (attribution_ceiling.py) used a looser regex than the roster actually ships, so it counted as recoverable a great deal the pipeline could never have caught.

Honest figures: 0.88% recoverable (not 5.8%), 6.39% genuinely nameless (not 1.5%), ceiling 92.15% (not 97%).

The rule: a diagnostic must import the shipped code path, never re-implement it. A measuring script that re-states the rule in its own words is measuring its own words. attribution_ceiling.py now imports the exact _GUEST_INTRODUCED_BY_HOST regex the roster ships, so the diagnostic cannot disagree with what we deploy.

Related, same family: quoting a number my own tool produced without asking what the tool assumed. Any figure that motivates work must be traceable to shipped code or to a frozen artifact.

F. Suite rot — the thing that made all of it possible¶

test_openai_detector installs a MagicMock into sys.modules["openai"] at import and can never remove it (restoring the real module re-imports a C extension and segfaults the interpreter). The mock had no __spec__, so every later importlib.util.find_spec("openai") died — 33 tests across unrelated modules failed on a full run and passed in isolation.

A suite that is red only when run whole is a suite people stop reading. And it was concealing a real bug: test_profile_sets was failing because experiment_dgx_only had no enrichers. The test that would have saved us was already there, already red, and already ignored.

If you take one thing from this note: a red suite is not a nuisance, it is an unread alarm.

tier	what it is	status
0	unit traps — adversarial synthetic inputs (`speaker_detection_traps.yaml`, roster ad fixtures, GI invariants)	good, and they now carry the real production text
1	mutation testing — re-break each fix, assert something goes red	done ad hoc, in a scratch script. Not repeatable.
2	wiring contracts — drive the real chokepoint, assert the guard is reached	thin. One for speakers, one for GI.
3	golden diarization — real pyannote clusters + hand-labelled ground truth	MISSING. This is the blind spot.
4	corpus-level invariants — cross-episode checks	MISSING
5	eval↔production parity	partial (providers yes, transcript variant no)

The blind spot is tier 3, and it is where every roster bug lived. Both roster failures — the stray-turn escape and the guest-name-on-a-host cascade — were invisible to synthetic fixtures and appeared immediately on real clusters. Synthetic diarization is too clean: it has no mis-assignments, no 2-second strays, no 8-voice episodes where one voice is 0.3% of the talk.

The proposal: the v4 fixture ladder¶

Tier 3 — golden diarization fixtures (highest value, do first)¶

Freeze the real pyannote output for a handful of episodes and hand-label the truth.

Input: the actual diarization turns (start, end, speaker) — already on disk, no GPU to regenerate — plus each voice's own text.
Ground truth: for every voice: host | guest | advertisement | cameo, and the correct name.
Assert: the roster reproduces it exactly.
Cost: zero GPU, milliseconds to run, and it is the only tier that would have caught the two bugs that shipped.

Seed it with the cases we already know are hard:

Hard Fork ep1 — pre-roll ad (2 voices), mid-roll ad, 2 hosts, 2 guests, one 2-second mis-assigned turn. This single episode is a better test than the entire synthetic suite.
An episode with no guests (news round-up) — the roster must not invent one.
An episode where a guest out-talks the host (#1169) — the swap case.
A panel (3+ real speakers).
A short episode (<10 min) — the scale guard.

Tier 4 — corpus-level invariants¶

Some truths are only visible across episodes. These would have caught the ads instantly.

An advertisement repeats; editorial does not. Near-identical text blocks recurring across episodes of a feed are ads. This is the proposed fix for the mid-roll (#1188), and it is exact: Jonathan Knight reads the same copy verbatim in 7 of 10 episodes.
A host recurs; a guest usually does not. A "host" appearing in exactly one episode is suspicious. Amy Lawrence appeared in 10/10 with 0.3% talk share — a host who never speaks is a contradiction, and it is checkable.
A person's talk share should be consistent with their role. A host under 5% of talk, or a guest over 50%, is a smell.
No corpus-wide near-duplicate names. Kevin Roos / Kevin Russo / Kevin Roose are one man.

Run these as a corpus audit over the rebuilt 10 episodes and fail the build on violations.

Tier 1 — make mutation testing a real target¶

make mutants — a checked-in list of (file, correct_code, broken_code, test_selection), run in CI on demand. It found 6 unguarded fixes out of 11 and it must not stay in a scratch file.

Tier 5 — close the eval↔production gap¶

Extend the existing parity test to assert the eval dataset reads the same transcript variant production resolves (.adfree.txt, not .cleaned.txt).

Acceptance gate for v4¶

Before a 100-episode build is authorised:

Tier-3 golden diarization fixtures exist and pass, including the Hard Fork ep1 case.
The tier-4 corpus audit runs over the 10-episode rebuild with zero violations — specifically: no ad narrator named, no host under 5% talk share, no near-duplicate person names.
make mutants is green.
make test-unit and make test-integration are green run whole, not just in isolation.
The mid-roll ad (#1188) is either fixed or explicitly accepted, in writing, with its blast radius measured.

The anatomy of a real episode — and why our fixtures are lying to us¶

Our synthetic fixtures are two speakers alternating politely for three minutes. No real episode looks like that, and every bug we shipped lived in the difference.

This is Hard Fork ep1, measured from the actual diarization (2-minute blocks, dominant voice):

  0:00 – 0:30    PRE-ROLL AD        two voices, neither ever heard again, both self-introducing
  0:30 – 30:00   HOSTS              Kevin/Casey alternating every 2–6 min: banter, then news
 ~36:00          MID-ROLL AD        one voice, ~50s, self-introducing, same copy in 7/10 episodes
 30:00 – 52:00   GUEST INTERVIEW    the guest holds the floor for 22 CONTIGUOUS MINUTES
 52:00 – 56:00   HANDOFF            back to hosts
 56:00 – 70:00   SECOND GUEST       a different guest, a different segment
 70:00 – 72:00   OUTRO + CREDITS    hosts, then producer names nobody speaks

Eight voices. Two of them are adverts. Two are hosts. Two are guests. One is a 15-second cameo. One is a mid-roll advertiser. A two-speaker toy fixture cannot express a single one of the failures this arc produced.

What each structural feature does to us¶

feature	what it breaks
pre-roll ad opens the episode	"the host is the opening voice" hands the show to the advertiser
ad narrators self-introduce	the most-trusted naming signal is the one the ad is built to trigger
a guest holds the floor for 22 min	the guest out-talks the host over any short window → intro-share co-host detection swaps them (#1169)
hosts alternate in 2–6 min blocks	neither host dominates the intro window → a real co-host fails `CO_HOST_INTRO_SHARE` and falls through to guest naming
rapid banter, tiny backchannel turns ("Yeah." "Right.")	dozens of sub-second turns; one mis-assigned 2-second turn was enough to defeat the ad rule
mid-roll ad, 35–40% in	outside any edge window — invisible to a structural edge rule (#1188, still open)
credits name people who never speak	producers/editors are perfect NER bait
the same show is sometimes a guest feed (ep6 is an Ezra Klein cross-post)	the "hosts" of the episode are not the hosts of the feed

Why this is the grounding problem, not just a roster problem¶

Speaker attribution is derived from the character offset of the grounded quote. So the accuracy of grounding is bounded by the accuracy of the turn boundaries, and the danger is not uniform across the episode:

Inside the 22-minute guest block — attribution is forgiving. An offset can be wrong by a paragraph and still land on the right speaker.
In the banter — attribution is brutal. Turns are seconds long, so an offset that is wrong by one sentence flips Kevin into Casey. This is where an insight silently changes mouths.
At a handoff (52:00) — the host and guest are adjacent, so an off-by-one-turn error swaps a guest's claim onto a host. This is the single most dangerous position in the episode and we do not test it at all.
Inside an ad — a quote grounded here is always wrong, and worse, it is fluent, confident, and quotable ("If you play our games, you probably know there's something a bit different about them"). Ad copy is written to be memorable. It is the perfect false insight.

The grounding invariant we actually want: a quote may never be grounded inside an ad region, and a quote adjacent to a turn boundary must be attributed conservatively or not at all.

The fixture we should build: one realistic show, not twenty toy ones¶

Build a single canonical episode fixture with the structure above, and derive the variants from it. It costs nothing to run (it is timings + text, no audio, no GPU) and it exercises every failure mode at once:

episode: hardfork_canonical
  0:00–0:30    AD_1, AD_2      self-introduce; never return          -> must be "Advertisement"
  0:30–30:00   HOST_A, HOST_B  alternate in 2–6 min blocks           -> both must be hosts
  ~36:00       AD_3            self-introduces; ~50s; mid-roll       -> must NOT be a guest  (#1188)
  30:00–52:00  GUEST_1         22 contiguous minutes                 -> must be a guest, named
  52:00–56:00  HOST_A          handoff                               -> boundary attribution
  56:00–70:00  GUEST_2         second segment                        -> not introduced in description
  70:00–72:00  HOST_A, HOST_B  outro + credits naming non-speakers   -> credits must not become guests

Assertions it should carry, all of which we have shipped bugs against:

AD_1, AD_2, AD_3 are never named, and never appear as person / host / guest.
HOST_A and HOST_B are both hosts — even with known_hosts empty, even though neither dominates the intro window.
GUEST_1 gets the guest name; no host ever wears it.
GUEST_2 is not in the episode description → the corroboration gate drops the name → the voice must fall back to its own self-introduction, or stay SPEAKER_NN. It must not inherit GUEST_1's name.
Every producer named in the credits is absent from the roster.
A quote taken from inside AD_3 is refused by grounding.
A quote taken 1 second either side of the 52:00 handoff is attributed correctly, or not at all.

Then perturb it — this is where the real bugs were:

+noise: reassign one 2-second turn from AD_1 to a random mid-episode position. (This exact perturbation, in real pyannote output, put the guest's name on a host.)
+short: the same show cut to 4 minutes. (Guards the scale rule.)
+swap: the guest answers at length inside the first 90 seconds. (#1169.)
+solo: no guests at all — a news round-up. (The roster must not invent one.)
+panel: three real guests.
+crosspost: the episode is another show's feed (ep6) — the feed's hosts are not the episode's.

How this changes what we ask the LLM for¶

The same realism argument applies to the dialogue we feed the extraction prompt. Today the GI prompt sees a flat screenplay. It does not know:

where the ads are (so it can quote one),
who is the host and who is the guest (so it cannot tell a question from a claim), or
which segment it is in (so it cannot tell "we're doing the news" from "we're interviewing an expert").

A host asking "So is prescribing via chatbot actually unsafe?" and a guest answering "Prescribing via chatbot is unsafe" produce nearly identical sentences — and only one of them is a STANCE. That is not a prompt-tuning problem, it is a missing input problem. Feeding the extractor the segment structure (ad / banter / interview / outro) and the speaker's role, not just their name, is the highest-leverage change available to insight quality — and we already compute all of it in the roster.

G. Identity is READ, not inferred — and the fixtures must force that¶

Added after the roster was rebuilt a third time. This is the failure I repeated most, so it gets its own section: five times in three days I ignored the metadata and built a statistical rule instead.

What went wrong¶

I inferred hosts from talk share and span — "a host talks a lot and is present from the first minute to the last". That is not a property of podcasts. It is a property of one podcast, and it inverts by format:

show	who talks most	who actually hosts
Invest Like the Best	the guest, 82%	Patrick O'Shaughnessy, 17%
Latent Space	the guest, 84.5%	Brandon, 8.6%
Hard Fork	the hosts, 26–39%	the hosts
Hard Fork	the episode is opened by a pre-roll ADVERT	not a host at all

Any rule keyed on "who talks most" or "who opens" is tuned to whichever show it was written against. Meanwhile the feed says who hosts it, in plain English — 7 of our 10 state it outright:

Hard Fork      "journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore..."
The Journal    "Hosted by Ryan Knutson and Jessica Mendoza."
No Priors      "co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo talk to..."
Odd Lots       "Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway explore..."
Invest Like…   in the TITLE: "Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy"

The contract the fixtures must now enforce¶

source	answers	must never
metadata (feed title/description/authors; episode description)	WHO the hosts are, and HOW MANY	be overruled by a statistic
the conversation (transcript)	WHICH VOICE each one is; and the whole answer when the feed is silent	promote a voice that performs no role
talk share	ad vs person only (30 seconds vs 20 minutes — that gap does not invert)	ever separate host from guest

The role is performed: the host welcomes you to the show and introduces the guest; the guest says thanks for having me. That is format-independent, and it is what finally worked.

The cases the fixtures must simulate¶

Every one of these is real, and each is a distinct trap. A fixture suite that omits any of them will let the same class of bug back in.

#	case	real example	what it breaks
1	guest out-talks the host 5:1	Invest Like the Best (82% / 17%)	any talk-share host rule
2	host holds <10% of the episode	Latent Space (Brandon, 8.6%)	"the host talks a lot"
3	the labels are SWAPPED	NVIDIA — the cluster labelled `Nicolas Cerisier` says "I'm Noah Kravitz. My guest is Nicolas Serissier"	everything downstream; only the conversation reveals it
4	the feed names NO host	Planet Money, Latent Space, NVIDIA (3/10)	metadata-only designs
5	the description lists PAST GUESTS	Latent Space — Bret Taylor, Chris Lattner, George Hotz	NER-over-description. A better NER does not fix it: they are people
6	the show's own name looks like a person	"At Planet Money, we explore..."	naive capitalised-run extraction
7	publisher possessive glued to the name	"Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal"	name cleaning
8	the host is only in the TITLE	"Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy"	description-only parsing
9	an ad narrator self-introduces	"I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic."	the most-trusted naming signal
10	a host's turn merges into a guest's cluster	Hard Fork — briefly produced a THIRD host	uncapped conversation-derived roles
11	rotating/narrated hosts, 13 voices	Planet Money	two-speaker assumptions
12	a cross-post: the feed's hosts are not the episode's	Hard Fork ep6 is an Ezra Klein show	feed-level `known_hosts` applied blindly

How to build them: one golden fixture per SHOW, plus a metadata axis¶

The tier-3 golden fixtures (real diarization + hand-labelled truth) need a second half: the metadata each episode was resolved against. A roster fixture without its feed metadata is testing half the system, and it is the half that was never the problem.

Each show's fixture should therefore carry:

show: hard_fork
feed:
  title: "Hard Fork"
  description: "...journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore..."
  authors: ["The New York Times"]          # an ORG — must not become a host
expected_hosts_from_feed: ["Kevin Roose", "Casey Newton"]   # and HOW MANY: 2

episode:
  description: "...a trial against Elon Musk... Dr. Adam Rodman, of Harvard, returns..."
expected_guests_after_gate: ["Dr. Adam Rodman"]             # Musk/Altman rejected

diarization:            # the REAL pyannote turns, frozen. No audio, no GPU.
  - {start: 0.0,   end: 15.0,  speaker: SPEAKER_04}
  - ...
voice_texts:            # each cluster's own words — where the role is PERFORMED
  SPEAKER_04: "I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic."
  SPEAKER_07: "I'm Kevin Russo and this is Hard Fork."          # ASR mangles the name

expected_roster:
  SPEAKER_04: {role: advertisement, named: false}
  SPEAKER_07: {role: host,  name: "Kevin Roose"}               # snapped to the FEED's spelling
  SPEAKER_03: {role: guest, name: "Dr. Adam Rodman"}

The perturbations, and which case each one guards:

perturbation	how	guards
`+no_feed_hosts`	blank the feed description	4 — forces the conversation path
`+swapped`	exchange two clusters' texts	3 — the NVIDIA bug
`+quiet_host`	shrink the host's turns to <10%	2
`+loud_guest`	grow the guest's turns to >80%	1
`+stray_turn`	move one 2-second turn of an ad voice to mid-episode	the cascade that put a guest's name on a host
`+guest_soup`	add "Past guests include ..." to the feed description	5
`+merged_cluster`	append a host sentence to the guest's `voice_texts`	10 — the third-host bug
`+short`	cut the episode to 4 minutes	the scale rule
`+solo`	remove the guest entirely	the roster must not invent one
`+crosspost`	swap in another show's hosts	12

Each perturbation is a one-line edit to a frozen fixture, costs no GPU, and reproduces a bug that actually shipped. That is the whole point of doing it this way rather than adding more toy strings.

The assertion that would have caught everything¶

No name may appear in the roster that is not either (a) stated in the feed, (b) stated in the episode description and corroborated, or (c) spoken in the transcript by the voice it is assigned to.

Amy Lawrence, Paul Tenorio, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Tim Cook — every single one fails that test. It is checkable, it is cheap, and it belongs in the corpus audit (tier 4).

Open items¶

#1188 mid-roll house ads — Jonathan Knight still enters the corpus as a guest of Hard Fork with GUESTS_ON edges. He does not displace a real guest and no longer poisons host detection, so it is corpus pollution rather than misattribution. Proposed fix: cross-episode repetition (tier 4).
Under-attribution is now the failure mode. The corroboration gate drops guests whose names appear only in the transcript, not the description (David Duvenaud, Andrew Marantz). The roster's per-voice self-intro is the safety net. This trade is deliberate (#876 — a wrong name is worse than no name), but it should be measured, not assumed.
The eval harness needs the same parity assertion the profiles have (§D). TestEvalMatchesProduction compares configs; it did not notice that the harness passed no transcript_segments at all, so every voice gate was dead in eval while live in production. Fixed for GI (gi_transcript_and_segments, guarded by mutation-tested wiring contracts). KG branch audited (2026-07-16): no parity gap. kg.build_artifact has no transcript_segments parameter and production KG (metadata_generation.py) never passes one — KG extracts entities/topics from the full transcript text plus detected_hosts/detected_guests names, and has no per-speaker voice gate like GI's evidence grounding. So the eval KG branch correctly passes no segments; there is nothing to wire, and adding the argument would be dead weight. Item closed.
The 6.39% nobody-names-them bucket. Now honestly classified as unidentified rather than counted as our defect (§E2). It is a real ceiling, not a bug — but it is worth revisiting whether a narrated-show fixture could recover any of it from the narrator's own framing ("a school teacher in Ohio told us…").
v4 must carry ad-region fixtures so ad EXCISION is testable on our own fixtures (2026-08-03). gi.ad_regions.excise_ad_regions was rewritten this arc from a single-contiguous-block cutter (which cut ONE pre-roll span and excised nothing at all when an episode had more than one ad block — "5 pattern hits, 0 chars removed") to per-cluster excision: cluster the ad-pattern hits, cut each block on its own (pre-, mid-, post-roll), keep the content between. It is currently exercised only by hand-built strings in tests/unit/podcast_scraper/gi/test_ad_regions.py. v4 should add fixtures that make this real:
a multi-ad episode: pre-roll + at least one mid-roll + post-roll, with real content between each — asserts every block is cut and the middle survives (the exact bug: multiple blocks → cut nothing);
a near-start sponsor after a brief real intro — documents the accepted trade that the pre-roll rule cuts from char 0, so a short real opening is collateral (the precision fix — an NLP ad-start boundary that spares short intros — is deferred to #1385);
a screenplay-formatted variant (Name:\n turns), since sentence-snapping behaves differently there (".\n" vs ". "), and the ad-map now records excised_texts — the actual removed text per range — which a fixture can assert against. Ties into #1188 (mid-roll house ads) and the RFC-#1385 content-quality/ad-load work (which needs reliable excision for the spoken-ad metric).

Browser-suite mocks that v4 fixtures should retire (#1619, added 2026-08-14)¶

The operator viewer's Playwright suite has never had a backend: its webServer runs Vite alone, so mockSignIn installs a catch-all route answering every /api/** request with {}, and each spec overrides the endpoints it cares about. 59 of 68 spec files call it. That is the real shape of "the viewer suite is mocked" — not a few stubbed endpoints, but no server at all, with 242 per-endpoint overrides layered on top.

It no longer has to be that way: the same fixture-bootstrapped API the consumer suite uses serves every endpoint this app calls. mockSignIn(page, role, { liveApi: true }) opts a spec out of the catch-all, and web/gi-kg-viewer/e2e/run-local-stack.sh starts the backend.

Migration is spec-by-spec because each mock encodes an assumed backend state. Sorting what is left into three kinds matters, because only one of them is a fixture problem:

A. Satisfiable today — just migrate¶

The endpoint exists and the corpus has the data; the spec's assertions are written against a hand-authored payload and need rewriting against real output. Most of the 242 are here — the endpoints /api/corpus/{feeds,runs/summary,episodes,topic-clusters}, /api/artifacts, /api/search, /api/index/stats all return 200 with real data from the committed corpus.

Prefer asserting structure and provenance over exact strings: corpus-version-warning.spec.ts now reads the warning from /api/health and asserts the banner carries the server's own text, which survives a reworded message while still failing on a missing banner.

B. Corpus states v3 cannot produce¶

DECISION 2026-08-15: a v4 corpus is NOT planned. Everything in this section is therefore permanently mocked, not "pending a fixture". The rows below stay as the record of why each mock exists and what it would take to remove it — but nobody should read them as scheduled work, and no spec should be left half-migrated in anticipation of v4 arriving.

Practical consequence: category B and category C are now the same operational status (mocked for good) and differ only in the reason. If v4 is ever revisited, this table is the requirements list.

The requirements, kept for the record:

Needed state	Wanted by	Why v3 cannot
A speaker with >2 insights on one topic	consumer `perspectives.spec.ts` (per-speaker show-more cap)	no speaker exceeds 2 on any topic, so the preview cap is unreachable
Topic + corpus-enrichment signal fields	consumer `entity-signals.spec.ts`	fields absent from the fixture enrichments
Search/entity-search result shapes	consumer `search-listener-features.spec.ts`	corpus cannot reach those result shapes
A corpus stamped with an outdated `produced_by`	viewer version-warning paths	v3 carries no stamp at all — it happens to trigger the "no stamp" warning, but the "below minimum" branch has no fixture
Per-run `run.json` records, multi-feed and multi-day	viewer `pipeline.spec.ts` (all four UXS-006 §6 panels)	v3 ships only `enrichments/run_summary.json`, so `/api/corpus/runs/summary` returns `{"runs": []}` and every panel correctly renders nothing
>15 feeds	viewer `library.spec.ts` feed-filter search	the control renders only above a 15-feed threshold; v3 ships 9
An episode with no nearest neighbours	viewer `library.spec.ts` similar-empty branch	against a real index every episode has peers, so `items: []` is unreachable
Run counters in three states — positive, explicit `0`, legacy `null`	viewer `dashboard-pipeline-metrics-mocks.spec.ts`	one committed run cannot be all three at once
Lifted / compound results — a segment chunk resolving to an insight with an attributed speaker	`search-fr1` compound badge, all of `person-landing.spec.ts`	50 of 50 results across five queries return `"lifted": null`
Search results carrying speaker/topic subject metadata, ≥2 surfaceable by one query	`search-operator-compare.spec.ts` (the whole Compare operator)	no `speaker_name` / `topic_label` on any result; ≤1 `kg_entity`/`kg_topic` per query across four probes
A consensus pair with named speakers	`search-operator-bar` consensus assertions	pairs exist, but `person_a_label` / `person_b_label` / `cosine_similarity` are all `null`
Corpus content that answers the default digest topic queries (or a corpus-local `digest_topics` config)	`digest.spec.ts` topic bands, `dashboard.spec.ts` FR6.1	`DEFAULT_DIGEST_TOPICS` is configured, but every band resolves to `None` — and reports `topics_unavailable_reason: null`, which reads as "nothing configured"
A topic discussed on more than one show, and topics with real adjacency	`topic-entity-view.spec.ts` FR4.2 cross-show + #1055 related topics	`/api/relational/cross-show` → 0 shows and `/api/relational/related-topics` → 0 topics, for every topic probed (`who-said` and `topic-entities` DO return 9–10 each)
Topic timeline episodes	`search-to-graph-mocks.spec.ts` inline timeline	`/api/topics/{id}/timeline` answers 200 with `episodes: []` for every corpus topic
Audio inside the corpus tree	`transcript-viewer-dialog.spec.ts` player half	no `*.mp3` anywhere under `app-validation-corpus/v3`; `/api/corpus/media` → 400. Real MP3s exist at `tests/fixtures/audio/v3/`, but outside the corpus root the endpoint resolves against
A recently-published episode	`digest.spec.ts` recency dot	needs `publish_date == today`; committed dates cannot be
A topic cluster whose members span an episode outside the loaded artifact	`sibling-merge-cluster-mocks.spec.ts`	the merge under test needs a sibling that is genuinely off-slice before and on-slice after

Add to this table when a migration stalls on missing data rather than on assertions.

B0. The shape of what's left (2026-08-14)¶

Worth stating plainly, because it recurs: almost every remaining blocker is the same gap wearing different clothes — the corpus has no attributed, cross-linked speech. No lifted blocks, no speaker names on search results, no named consensus pairs, no cross-show topics, no topic adjacency. Fixing that one property in v4 unblocks person-landing entirely, the Compare operator, the compound-card surfaces, and both TEV relational tests.

The second recurring shape is state matrices — a control that must be seen in three states at once (run counters), or above a threshold a single corpus is either over or under (15 feeds, an undated episode, an episode published today). Those are not corpus-content problems and should not be solved by growing the corpus; they want either a second small fixture or to stay stubbed.

B1. The search index — RESOLVED, and what it did and did not unblock¶

Status 2026-08-14: resolved. The index runs in a linux/amd64 container built from docker/api/Dockerfile (tag podcast-api:e2e-local; nothing in the repo builds that tag, so build it by hand). /api/index/stats reports 848 vectors across transcript/insight/quote/ kg_topic/kg_entity/episode_title/summary, and /api/search returns real ranked hits.

Two things worth keeping, because both were initially mis-attributed to the dead index:

1. Topic bands are NOT a search problem — they are a corpus-content gap. corpus_digest.py runs each configured digest query through run_corpus_search, so an absent index does empty digest.topics. But with search fully working, topics is still []. load_digest_topics() falls back to DEFAULT_DIGEST_TOPICS (so topics are configured) and every band returns None — the fixture's content matches none of the default editorial queries within the window. Note the failure is silent in a misleading way: topics_unavailable_reason stays null, which reads as "nothing configured". This is a genuine v4 requirement: the corpus must contain episodes that answer the default digest topic queries, or the fixture must ship its own digest_topics config.

2. No result carries a lifted block. A compound result is a segment hit whose payload carries a non-null lifted (the insight the chunk was lifted into, plus its speaker/topic). Measured across five queries — systems thinking, risk management, Dr. Elena Fischer, lifelong learning, expert interviews — 50 of 50 results returned "lifted": null.

That single gap blocks more than it looks like:

Blocked surface	Why
`search-fr1.spec.ts` compound badge + lifted entity links	the badge and links only render on a compound row
`person-landing.spec.ts` — the whole file	its only shipped entry point is clicking the `lifted.speaker` link on a search hit

So a working index did not unblock person-landing, contrary to the earlier note here. v4 must produce lifted/compound results — segment chunks that resolve to an insight with an attributed speaker.

What the index did unblock: the tier/evidence surfaces of search-fr1.spec.ts (migrated), and library.spec.ts's "why this episode" snippet, which needs only an active search context.

C. Fault injection — permanently mocked, and correctly so¶

A real backend serving a real corpus will not return 404, 500, or a timeout on demand. Specs that exercise error handling (handoff/failure.spec.ts fulfils a 404 for corpus/episodes/detail) must keep their mocks. No fixture version fixes these, and v4 should not try. They are not debt; they are the right tool. Mark them so nobody re-opens them as migration work.