Data Hygiene First: Beating Garbage-In with Contracts

Data contracts define what upstream systems must provide and what downstream systems may assume. Schemas, uniqueness, and nullability become tests that fail fast when producers drift. For AI pipelines, this protects embeddings, training loops, and feature stores from silent corruption. Teams operationalize contracts with schema registries, CDC validation, and lineage tracking. When incidents occur, lineage makes blast radius measurable. Clean data is the cheapest performance optimization for any AI workload.