A real, confirmed opportunity we could not verify — and said so

This is not a savings-proof case study — there is no verified number here, and it should never be cited as one. What it is: a concrete example of the verification discipline itself — a real opportunity, diagnosed and re-confirmed with live data, that gets held back rather than shipped on the strength of an estimate alone, because the standard verification path structurally cannot reach it. That's a story about rigor, not about a delivered percentage.

The opportunity is real — not a dead end

The deep autoresearch loop found a genuine sharding opportunity in Angular's ci.yml: the adev job runs 161 independent test targets as one serial block, followed by adev-deploy's own production build. Composed estimate: 1386s → 666s (+51.9%) over two accepted changes. We shard-authored the first change for real — a genuine, working structural change, not a placeholder.

Then we checked whether the underlying hypothesis holds up against real data, not just the model. We pulled job-level timestamps from 5 independent real ci.yml runs.

Why it's unverified anyway

Live verification requires pushing a candidate branch to a fork and comparing real CI runs. Two structural facts block that here, neither fixable from our side: ci.yml only triggers on push to protected branches, never on a fork's pull request; and its jobs need credentials — including deploy secrets — that don't exist on a personal fork.

We piloted against the fork-safe PR-triggered workflow instead. That came back statistically null — but root-caused, not just measured: that workflow has no deploy job at all, and its own critical path is an unrelated 111-second job. The pilot tested the wrong workflow. It doesn't disprove the real hypothesis; it couldn't reach it in the first place.

The only remaining path

Verifying against the real workflow requires push access to Angular's protected branches and Angular's own deploy credentials — i.e., landing this as a genuine pull request against angular/angular itself, not an automated verification run. That's a different, public, reputational kind of action we don't take without explicit client sign-off. What's here documents a real opportunity the verification discipline correctly declined to claim without proof — not a dead end, and not a delivered result either.