| # OnCallVal design | |
| ## Positioning | |
| | Benchmark | Domain | What is scored | Missing | | |
| |---|---|---|---| | |
| | τ-bench / τ²-bench | airline/retail/telecom customer service | final database state + policy compliance | single-record edits; no blast radius; benign failures | | |
| | TheAgentCompany | generic office work | task completion in a fake company | long-horizon but low-stakes; no systems state | | |
| | SWE-bench | code repair | tests pass on a repo | it is coding, and it is static | | |
| | LifeVal (OpenAI) | everyday life | workflow completion | proprietary, unverifiable, life domain | | |
| | **OnCallVal** | **infrastructure operations** | **final world state: cause + mitigation + side effects** | | | |
| The differentiator is **collateral damage as a scored dimension**. In | |
| customer-service benchmarks a wrong action touches one record. In operations a | |
| wrong action takes down unrelated services. OnCallVal's `no_collateral` | |
| predicate makes the difference between a fix and a lucky fix measurable. | |
| ## Design principles | |
| 1. **State, not scripts.** Metrics, logs, and alerts are derived from world | |
| state at query time. There is no scripted incident timeline to memorize; | |
| the agent that fixes the state sees the metrics recover. This also makes | |
| every episode replayable and the scorer environment-side. | |
| 2. **Declared difficulty.** Faults and decoys are declared per episode with | |
| weights; tier is a pure function of weight. The tier can never disagree | |
| with the content of the task (enforced by test). | |
| 3. **End-state scoring.** The scorer inspects only the final world and the | |
| submitted report. It never reads the transcript, never repairs output, and | |
| never grants partial credit on `resolved`. Path efficiency is reported as | |
| diagnostics only. Two correct fixes with different routes both score 1. | |
| 4. **Fairness through runbooks.** Every service ships a runbook containing the | |
| recommended config values, the capacity formula, and known issues. Tasks | |
| never require guessing a magic value: the healthy state is always | |
| discoverable in-world. | |
| 5. **Budget pressure on triage.** Reads cost budget. A model that dumps every | |
| service's state runs out of actions before it can fix anything. Diagnosis | |
| must be directed, which is the actual on-call skill. | |
| ## Difficulty calibration | |
| No target range is published, because none has been measured. The observed | |
| ladder is 3B at 0/72 and 7B at 2/72 on the 72-task slice. Calibration is a | |
| falsifiable rule rather than a hoped-for number: | |
| - frontier-class agent above ~70% overall -> too easy: more decoys, more | |
| two-fault episodes; | |
| - below ~10% -> validate the tasks before raising difficulty (is the fix | |
| discoverable in-world? does the runbook actually contain the healthy value?); | |
| - in between -> tier monotonicity must hold (medium > hard > severe); if it | |
| breaks, the weights are wrong. | |
| If real baselines land above target, tighten budgets before adding fault | |
| complexity; if far below, add runbook hints before simplifying faults. | |
| ## Known limitations | |
| - The fleet is small (≤7 services, ≤6 hosts). Real incidents span hundreds of | |
| services; context-window economics push back. Scale is the obvious v2 axis. | |
| - Metrics are instantaneous derivations with light noise, not time series. | |
| Agents cannot trend a metric over an hour; they see now-values and logs. | |
| - The action API is deliberately small (15 actions). Real remediation includes | |
| canary deploys, feature-flag rollouts, and traffic shaping. | |
| - One defensible fix per fault. A creative but valid alternative remediation | |
| that defeats the fault's `active()` predicate also scores 1. That is by design. | |
| - Severity is simulated. Nothing here measures whether an agent communicates | |
| well with humans during an incident. | |
| ## Reproducibility | |
| `data/tasks.jsonl` is frozen. Regenerating with the shipped code reproduces it | |
| byte-for-byte (seeded generator, stable SHA-256-derived seeds, no builtin | |
| `hash()`). The held-out split lives under a private seed and is never shipped. | |