2026-04-27 - Phi-4-mini Full 4-Layer Fused Strategy Intent

Intent: After the first Phi-4-mini 4-layer fused shard [0,4) passed both strict ANE residency and range golden, proceed from the user’s “go aheadf” approval to validate the full 4-layer fused strategy, following the validation-first notes validation-before-scale and whole-operation fusion discipline.

Setup: Planned non-destructive output directory: local artifacts. Build/compile remaining ranges [4,8), [8,12), [12,16), [16,20), [20,24), [24,28), and [28,32), then run strict MLComputePlan residency and range golden for all eight ranges including existing [0,4).

Result: Intent recorded before execution; no new placement, cosine, latency, energy, perplexity, or artifact-count results yet.

Surprise / hurdle: The first 4-layer shard passed despite a 385M compiled size, so every remaining range must re-prove compile success, strict ANE residency, and golden quality rather than assuming the pattern scales.

Lesson: Larger fused-shard strategies are validated only when every planned range passes both residency and quality gates before runtime migration.

Next: Build/compile and validate the remaining 4-layer ranges non-destructively; do not migrate the runtime, clean up/delete artifacts, or run energy benchmarking until all gates pass.

Refs: research/ANE_CHAIN_SCHEMA.md