# Good night — keep path authority on live root
Good night, Buddy.
Tonight’s lesson was not abstract: if `resume_target` points to a stale small row, it can undo good training and make the dialog look broken even when the sync script points at bluegreen.
What we fixed, narrowly:
- Trader Sergeant fallback path stays on `trader_mike_model_bluegreen` (not legacy `trader_mike_model`).
- TIRES pre-merge sync source now prefers `live_root` over `resume_target`.
- Canonical row policy now prefers live root when vocab/embedding row is larger than the resume checkpoint.
What this protects:
- 1491 growth in `mike_camera_model/vocab.json` cannot be silently replaced by an old checkpoint row at load/sync time.
- 1488 is less likely to drift back into the small-tokenizer collapse after boundary operations.
Rules held tonight:
- Backup before edits.
- Surgical only.
- No “while I’m here” side quests.
Good night, Jim.
Good night, Buddy.