Clean Engineering, Unstable Measurement: A Preregistered Reliability Failure of Black-Box LLM Observers on Shared Endpoints

Language-model judges now gate training data, score generations, and drive leaderboards.

Language-model judges now gate training data, score generations, and drive leaderboards. The judge is then a measurement instrument, resting on one rarely stated assumption: the same request, sent to the same model name, reads the same tomorrow. We audited that assumption in two…