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SEISMOGRAPH’s STALE label says its newest recorded sample is old; it does not say why sampling stopped, how consistently the probe is collecting, or whether the provider’s model changed. That is a useful improvement over a reassuring-looking STABLE status, but it is only one measure of the system’s health.
The figures below come from project author Tatiana Radchenko’s September 30, 2026, DEV Community report. They are author-reported measurements from committed board snapshots and the project’s scripts/weather_window_stats.py script, with a test gate said to check the figures. They are not an independent audit or a live check of the board.
What does STALE mean on the SEISMOGRAPH board?
SEISMOGRAPH is an open-source canary system that periodically probes third-party LLM APIs and publishes hashes and differentially private aggregates to a public board. In Radchenko’s description, the board uses three status labels:
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- STABLE: no quorum-verified alert is present and the sample-age threshold has not been crossed.
- STALE: the newest sample is more than 30 hours old. This status is based on sample age, independently of the alert table.
Radchenko says the 30-hour threshold was chosen with a twice-daily probe schedule and observed delays of 2.5–4.5 hours behind a cron slot in mind. It represents a missed scheduled run plus observed lateness; the report does not describe it as a threshold optimized against false alarms. It flags old data, not the reason it is old, and does not by itself diagnose a provider outage or a stopped probe.
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What changed in the Mistral snapshots?
The reported comparison shows why adding an age signal matters—and why it should not be mistaken for recovery. The Mistral leg had ten samples in each snapshot, but its latest row was old in both. On September 9, the board still showed STABLE; by September 22, it showed STALE.
| Snapshot | Newest Mistral row | Board status | Rows counted | Window span | Mean interval | Collection rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 9, 2026 (Radchenko’s reported snapshot) | 176.00 hours old | STABLE | 10 | Not stated in Radchenko’s report | Not stated in Radchenko’s report | Not stated in Radchenko’s report |
| September 22, 2026 (Radchenko’s reported snapshot) | 73.19 hours old | STALE | 10 | 407.88 hours | 45.32 hours, against a nominal 12-hour cadence | 0.2648 of nominal cadence |
The September 22 values are Radchenko’s reported calculations from committed snapshots, not independently verified measurements. The lower age than on September 9 means the newest row was less old; it does not establish that collection had resumed at the expected pace. The 45.32-hour mean interval and 0.2648 relative collection rate show why age and collection cadence answer different questions.
Why can ten samples represent such a long period?
The board’s reported window uses the last ten rows by ID, rather than samples from a fixed time period. A count of ten therefore tells you how many rows are included, not how recently or regularly they were collected. On September 22, those ten Mistral rows spanned 407.88 hours—about 17 days—despite the nominal 12-hour probe cadence.
The window slides as new rows arrive, so two successive board reads can include many of the same samples. They are not independent observations. A time-bounded window would answer a different question—what the probe saw during a defined recent interval—but that is not the window described in the report.
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Can a fresh row still hide slow collection?
Yes. A newest-row age is a point-in-time freshness signal; it is not a collection-rate measure. Radchenko’s September 30 example concerns the Google leg after its key was restored: the newest row was 0.10 hours old, while ten samples spanned 363.20 hours and collection was reported at 0.2974 of nominal cadence. The fresh row does not erase the much longer span represented by the window.
The board does not publish collection rate, according to the report. Without that measure, a reader can see that a sample arrived recently but cannot tell from freshness alone whether the system has been producing samples near its expected cadence.
What can make the data incomplete or ambiguous?
Retries exhausted after HTTP 429 responses
When a probe receives HTTP 429 responses and exhausts its retries, the run is discarded rather than recorded as a row. Radchenko notes that 429s correlate with provider load. As a result, the missing observations may disproportionately include periods that are especially valuable for understanding behavior under load. The report identifies this censoring as an unresolved limitation.
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Output-length clamping
Before averaging, the probe clamps output length at 320 characters, according to the report. If a response reaches that cap, different underlying output streams can appear alike in the published fields. Radchenko gives upper bounds, based on published means, of 41.9% of Google records and 28.6% of Mistral records that could be at the cap; the report does not establish the exact live saturation fraction or claim that most live records are saturated.
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“A saturated stream is not a stable model. It is an unmeasured one, and in every field the board publishes, the two are identical.”
The practical distinction is important: a stable-looking published average does not demonstrate that the underlying outputs were measured in a way that could distinguish them.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why has the board not raised a public alert?
Radchenko says one observer is currently contributing, while a public drift alert requires agreement among three independent observers. With only one observer, a public alert cannot meet that quorum by construction. This is a property of the stated alert design, not evidence that the implementation failed to detect a change.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchIt also explains why a status that means “no alert” should not be read as “the provider was independently confirmed stable.” In this setup, the quorum requirement prevents a public alert from firing with the available observer count. The reported fleet measurements are from a single organization.
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What does the report establish about Mistral’s stoppage?
It does not establish the cause. Radchenko says the Mistral leg stopped on September 19 and that the cause had not been diagnosed in the report. An earlier event involved an account-level rate limit, but the author does not attribute the September 19 stoppage to the same cause. STALE reports the age of the last row; it cannot distinguish a credential problem, rate limiting, scheduling failure, provider issue, or another cause from the age signal alone.
How should readers interpret the backtest and benchmark plans?
The 38-day lead was a synthetic replay
Radchenko reports that a seeded historical replay flagged a known incident 38 days before its postmortem. That is a synthetic replay result, not a live detection or evidence that SEISMOGRAPH caught an incident in real time. The report does not describe an external benchmark run through the probe.
Cross-observer benchmark integration was a proposal
The author proposes a pinned public benchmark registry for suites eligible for cross-observer correlation, with private corpora treated as fleet-only. External suites would also need to be classified for whether output-length saturation can be interpreted. The report presents this as a proposal, not shipped functionality, and gives no release date.
Authentication checks had a measured and an unmeasured part
The report describes testing provider-specific key and Bearer authentication paths against a native provider endpoint and an OpenAI-compatible layer. The native endpoint’s model listing succeeded with the provider-specific header, while the compatible layer rejected it. A generation call using that header remained an expectation, not a reported test result.
What should a reader take from the status?
STALE makes one formerly hidden condition visible: the newest sample has aged past the stated threshold. It does not turn the board into a diagnosis of probe health or provider behavior. To interpret a drift board, keep the questions separate: how old is the latest row, how often are rows being collected, what time span does the displayed window cover, can the measurements saturate, and is there enough independent-observer agreement to issue an alert?
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