Process Rewards

Blame is the unglamorous foundation of automation. When a human team misses a deadline, managers rarely ask only, “Did the project succeed?” They ask a more useful question: which handoff failed? Did the analyst misunderstand the data? Did engineering break the pipeline? Did the reviewer approve a bad output because the earlier work looked plausible? This is the difference between evaluation and coaching. Evaluation produces a score. Coaching produces a diagnosis. ...

A chatbot rarely fails all at once. In production, failure is usually more boring than cinema. A user asks something borderline. The model refuses. The user rephrases. The model gives a harmless explanation. The user narrows the topic. The model follows the conversation. Then, several turns later, the assistant provides content it should not have provided. No thunder. No villain monologue. Just an interaction history doing what interaction histories do: accumulating context. ...