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Improve randomness usage when creating workloads#147

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improve-randomness-workload-guidance
May 14, 2026
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Improve randomness usage when creating workloads#147
SeanTAllen merged 1 commit into
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improve-randomness-workload-guidance

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@SeanTAllen SeanTAllen commented May 14, 2026

The workload skill now incorporates the lesson from swarm testing: when every test run draws actions uniformly from the same broad menu, runs converge toward the same average mix and rarely reach the deep states where many bugs live. If each individual run is narrowly biased instead — restricted to a subset of actions, with skewed probabilities — and the biases vary across runs, each run goes deep into one corner of the state space, and the swarm covers far more ground than uniform mixing ever does.

In Antithesis terms: if your workload's probabilities and action weights are baked into the code, every timeline mixes operations in roughly the same proportions. You rarely hit the deep skewed states — long runs of the same action, whole categories never appearing — where a lot of bugs actually live. The new guidance is to draw those probabilities and weights themselves at the start of each timeline, biased toward the extremes including zero (which omits a class of action entirely from that timeline).

The advice lives under "Vary randomness across timelines" in the workload skill's test-commands reference, with a sibling bullet in the Guidance checklist so it surfaces at self-review.

@SeanTAllen SeanTAllen added the changelog - non-breaking This PR includes a non-breaking customer facing change label May 14, 2026
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github-actions Bot commented May 14, 2026

Skill Context Report

Partial counts the skill's SKILL.md only. Full counts SKILL.md plus any files under references/.
Each cell is base -> head (delta, percent change) for the pull request.
Only skills changed in the pull request are included.

Skill Partial Full
antithesis-workload 2793 -> 2794 (+1, +0.0%) 9202 -> 9676 (+474, +5.2%)

The skill's randomness guidance covered determinism (route everything
through the SDK so it replays) but not the shape of the random
distributions themselves. Workloads that hardcoded probabilities and
action weights as constants ended up with every timeline exploring
the same average mix, rarely reaching the deep skewed states where
many bugs live.

The new guidance is to draw those probabilities and weights themselves
at the start of each timeline, biased toward the extremes including
zero. It lives under "Vary randomness across timelines" in
test-commands.md, with a sibling bullet in the Guidance checklist and
a pointer added from iteration.md's "Common Improvements".
@SeanTAllen SeanTAllen force-pushed the improve-randomness-workload-guidance branch from bc6a09c to cc5fdd2 Compare May 14, 2026 20:43
@SeanTAllen SeanTAllen merged commit cbf16ee into main May 14, 2026
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@SeanTAllen SeanTAllen deleted the improve-randomness-workload-guidance branch May 14, 2026 20:45
github-actions Bot added a commit that referenced this pull request May 14, 2026
github-actions Bot added a commit that referenced this pull request May 14, 2026
BillGrieser-Antithesis added a commit that referenced this pull request May 15, 2026
Brings in PRs #146 (snouty launch consistency), #147 (workload randomness
guidance), #148 (interesting input values reference), #150 (workload
fault-tolerance mindset), plus version metadata bumps.

Conflict resolutions:
- antithesis-debug/SKILL.md: version metadata — kept origin/main's
  freshest value (auto-regenerated anyway).
- antithesis-launch/SKILL.md: kept feat/triage's more detailed webhook
  default rule (basic_test for docker-compose, basic_k8s_test for
  kubernetes) over main's older shorter rule.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
BillGrieser-Antithesis added a commit that referenced this pull request May 15, 2026
Brings in PRs #146/#147/#148/#150 from main (snouty launch consistency,
workload randomness / interesting-values / fault-tolerance guidance) plus
version metadata bumps. fix/debug-skill-moment-and-refs' own commits are
preserved unchanged.

Single conflict resolved: antithesis-debug/SKILL.md version metadata —
took origin/main's freshest value.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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