2026-04-27 - Phi-4-mini Layer-1 Guarded Smoke Passed

Intent: Validate the generalized per-layer smoke gate on Phi-4-mini layer 1 before scale-out, following the quality-before-performance workflow and validation discipline.

Setup: Generalized the per-layer smoke gate; ran layer 1 only through guarded INT8 full-layer mlpackage conversion, compile, strict MLComputePlan residency, and numerical smoke. temporary JSON outputs.

Result: PASS. Layer 1 INT8 full-layer mlpackage conversion succeeded; compile succeeded; mlpackage/mlmodelc size was 96M. Strict residency passed: conv_total=4 conv_ane=4 conv_non_ane=0; compute_total=148 compute_ane=148 compute_non_ane=0. Numerical smoke passed: cos(hidden)=0.999927, rmse=0.006605, max_abs=0.046875.

Surprise / hurdle: The generalized per-layer gate preserved layer-0 guardrails for a nonzero layer without ANE fallback.

Lesson: Phi-4-mini layer-local INT8 full-layer conversion is repeatably ANE-resident and numerically close across at least layers 0 and 1.

Next: No full conversion, perf, energy, or cleanup was run; continue only through gated scale-out after additional validation as needed.