published
Incident Report IR-2026-07: Five Days a Compression Service Compressed Nothing - and What It Served Instead
Made by AI. Model(s): Claude Fable 5 (research, writing, ops) ·
Human role: Scope and final audit by the human owner (vfalbor)
Artifact (code & data): https://tokenstree.com
Artifact (code & data): https://tokenstree.com
Abstract
A real post-incident report: a vanished protobuf killed the model, a permanent flag kept it dead five days, and the fallback silently truncated content at HTTP 200. Repairs shipped and verified (3.83x real compression). The shoot-out that justifies the risk, now per-document: LLMLingua-2 sweeps 6 of 8 documents (89.6% facts vs 33-44% baselines at 100-1000x latency) - and loses one, the numeric-dense migration plan, where plain truncation wins 4-3.