Field note · October 14, 2025
Correction: Baseline before model
The page claimed more than it should have. What it says now, and where the pattern stops applying.
Sharpened the wording on Baseline before model after someone pointed out it was overstated.
The original read as though the pattern always applies. It does not. Build the dumbest thing that could work and measure it properly. Your model must beat it on the same split, or it has done nothing.
What it should have said — and now does — is where it stops applying. Every technique has a range of validity, and a pattern library that states rules without stating their limits produces exactly the cargo-culting it was meant to prevent.
The revised page names the case where the simple version is fine, so you are not paying the cost of the careful version on a table with four rows.
Corrections go in the page, with a note about what changed. No silent edits. The course will contain errors — it is thirty-six lessons about a field where the standard advice is frequently wrong — and the only defensible approach is to fix them visibly.
The repository takes issues, and several pattern pages are sharper than what we shipped because someone argued.