3 February 2026

Flake labels that survive Monday triage

A practical labeling scheme for intermittent cases so quarantine lists stay honest through the week.

Desk with annotated papers and a highlighter

Flake labels rot when anyone can apply them without evidence. Require two independent runs that fail and pass without a code change before a case earns the intermittent tag. Record the run ids in the case comment so Monday triage can verify the claim.

Separate environment flake from assertion flake. Environment flake follows agent restarts and network blips; assertion flake follows timing waits and soft checks. Mixing them produces quarantine lists that never shrink.

Review intermittent tags every two weeks. Cases that fail consistently for five consecutive nights should lose the flake label and enter the regression backlog. Cases that pass for ten nights should return to the green suite with a note that the quarantine period ended.

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