BoboTax — the four levers of prevention leverage

Not a blame chart. Each axis is a lever on the future: how much would a change at this level keep this failure from recurring? Drag a lever out = more leverage there. The shaded shape is the failure's leverage fingerprint.

Forward-looking. The question is never "whose fault was it?" — it's "where is the lever for next time?" A frozen Opus-4.7 keeps shipping as-is unless someone changes something. Bobotax asks: who has the longest lever?

C the model developer  🏛️

The lab's humans — who chose the corpus, the RLHF, the architecture, and shipped the weights.

Lever: a differently-built model.

Made of humans making choices — and the axis no industry taxonomy will name. Adverse-to-deflation by design.

A the model run / stochasticity  🎲

The dice at runtime — the same prompt resampled.

Lever: re-run, self-consistency, an output gate.

A thing, not a person — no persona. High only for genuinely run-unstable failures.

D the deployer-org / orchestration  🧩

The team that built the deployment around the model.

Lever: the RAG corpus, system prompt, tool wiring, guardrails, model-version choice.

A team with a persona. Distinct from B. (The "K4" finding that earned this axis.)

B the human using it  🧑‍💻

The person who prompts and operates it — the doctor typing the query.

Lever: a better-formed request, added context, a user-side check.

A person with a persona. Distinct from D.