Our AI Convinced Us We Had a Million New Users

We Didn’t

The snowblower crisis was a five-alarm fire. This was a slow leak of poison into the water supply.

Our first case was about concept drift: a model growing outdated as the world changed. This case is about schema drift, a stealthier failure where the data’s fundamental structure changes, corrupting reality itself. Standard monitoring tools don’t just miss it; they give it a passing grade.

This is how a single data type change in a pipeline sent a product team on a six-month quest to build features for users who didn’t exist. The premium toolkit this week is a set of phantom hunters: scripts designed to detect structural and semantic drift that evade conventional statistics.

A Strategy Built on Illusion