Experiment design for future bets

Problem

The context catalog roadmap includes ambitious future capabilities — advanced relationship inference, cross-product metadata sharing, real-time enrichment — but there is no framework for validating these ideas before committing major engineering investment. Without designed experiments that can test key assumptions cheaply (e.g., "does AI agent accuracy improve with relationship metadata?"), the team risks either building expensive features that don't move metrics or indefinitely deferring promising ideas because the risk feels too high.

Context

• The larger future bets for context schema/catalog contracts and Nimble enrichment flows across product surfaces should be validated with scoped experiments before they absorb major implementation effort or become roadmap commitments.
• This task should design the experiments, not run them: define hypotheses, success signals, cheap prototypes or evaluation methods, and the decision rule for what happens next.
• Expected touchpoints include dataface/ai/, context-contract docs, eval wiring, and inspect-derived artifacts, opportunity/prerequisite notes, eval or QA harnesses where relevant, and any external dependencies required to run the experiments.

Possible Solutions

• A - Rely on team intuition to pick which future bet to pursue: fast, but weak when the bets are expensive or high-risk.
• B - Recommended: design lightweight validation experiments for the strongest bets: specify hypothesis, method, scope, evidence, and the threshold for continuing or dropping the idea.
• C - Build full prototypes for every future direction immediately: rich signal, but far too expensive for early-stage uncertainty.

Plan

1. Choose the future bets for context schema/catalog contracts and Nimble enrichment flows across product surfaces that are both strategically important and uncertain enough to justify explicit experiments.
2. Define the hypothesis, cheapest credible validation method, required inputs, and success/failure signals for each experiment.
3. Document the operational constraints, owners, and follow-up decisions so the experiment outputs can actually change roadmap choices.
4. Rank the experiments by cost versus decision value and sequence the first one or two instead of trying to validate everything at once.

Implementation Progress

Review Feedback

• [ ] Review cleared