Gahow Wang
8ac41a8684
The B3 audit flagged the trace replayer's "fire turn N+1 immediately if turn N is behind schedule" semantics as a potential benchmark crime, because under saturation the effective arrival process becomes policy-dependent (slow policy -> longer session lifetimes -> more concurrent in-flight -> harder system -> still slower). The audit called this dispatch slip. But in agentic workloads, turn N+1 is generated by a tool-call response or an autonomous-loop step, not by a human reading the previous reply. There is no inter-turn think-time. So the replayer's "no think-time, sequential within session, fire-immediately-when- ready" behavior is the correct model of agentic production, and the feedback amplification is a real property of production systems under saturation rather than an artifact of the replayer. The note (analysis/characterization/agentic_dispatch_coupling.md) lays out: - The dispatch rule and the apparent feedback loop - Why agentic workloads do not have user think-time - Application of Little's Law: slower policy carries higher concurrent in-flight load, so the policy x feedback gap is real, not artifact - Reframes B3 as the "production-replay" experiment and B4 as the orthogonal "controlled-load" experiment, complementary not hierarchical - Calls the feedback amplification itself out as a finding worth reporting (e.g. unified's ~2x latency-p90 gap over lmetric in B3 reflects both the routing improvement and the in-flight reduction) - Contrasts with chat workloads (human think-time partially breaks the feedback loop, agentic removes that floor) Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>