Origin Part 8: Four Wrong Turns Before the Breakthrough

We rewrote the decoder four times in one day. Only the last one understood anything. Part 7 ended with "how are you" returning "i don't know" while our tier tests reported 100% pass. Everything was green. The model was broken. The disconnect between those two facts defined the day. Here's the actual arc. Wrong Turn 1: Retrieval The first attempt was retrieval. We built five decoder candidates, sandbox-tested them against 400 dialogue pairs, and a retrieval-based decoder won cleanly. F1 of 0.246