# TASK-121-04-02-02: Runtime Verdict and Governance Notes

**Parent:** [TASK-121-04-02](./TASK-121-04-02_Evaluation_Harness_Goldens_And_Safety_Review.md)  
**Status:** ✅ Done  
**Priority:** 🔴 High

**Completion Summary:** The repo now has a scored baseline for `mlx_local` on both synthetic scenarios and several real viewport scenarios. `Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct-4bit` scores cleanly on the real smoke/progression variants while producing materially less noise than `Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct-4bit`, and the current governance interpretation is now recorded explicitly: `4B` is the cleaner practical local baseline while `2B` remains viable for smoke/dev use with more noise.

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## Objective

Turn raw smoke/eval findings into one explicit verdict about which backend
paths are useful, experimental, or not yet ready.

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## Implementation Direction

- classify backend/model combinations into:
  - smoke-test-only
  - usable for local experimentation
  - candidate for guarded product use
- record known weaknesses such as:
  - input echo tendency
  - empty but valid contract outputs
  - weak issue localization
  - weak deterministic-check recommendation quality
- keep governance notes explicit around:
  - false confidence
  - misleading "valid JSON but useless semantics"
  - privacy of reference images

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## Repository Touchpoints

- `_docs/_VISION/`
- `_docs/_TASKS/`
- `_docs/_TESTS/README.md`

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## Acceptance Criteria

- the repo has one explicit verdict for current backend paths
- later model work can be evaluated against a recorded baseline instead of memory
