Decide if a metric move is signal or noise before you react to it
A metric moving is not the same as a metric moving for a reason.
- Use it for
- Anyone watching a dashboard who's tempted to react to a single data point.
Every metric wiggles day to day, and a lot of "the number moved" reactions are actually just normal noise dressed up as a trend. Treating every move as meaningful wastes effort chasing variance that would have reverted on its own, while genuinely real shifts sometimes get missed because they look similar to normal noise at first glance. This prompt checks a move against the metric's actual normal range before deciding whether it deserves a reaction.
When not to use this
If you already have a long, stable baseline and this move is obviously multiples outside anything you've seen before, you don't need this check — act on it. This is for the ambiguous case where you genuinely aren't sure.
Did this work?
You can say specifically whether this move falls inside or outside normal variance, instead of reacting to it on gut feel alone.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.