[clinic · EX-03] Break the funnel on purpose

[akash-coded]

Exercise clinic. One long-running thread per exercise. Ask here rather than opening a
new thread — the answers accumulate where the next person will look for them.

Exercise: EX-03 — Break the funnel on purpose · difficulty 🔴

What this exercise asks

Read the exercise first; this thread is for when you are stuck, not instead of it.

Three ways people get stuck on this one

1. Breaking it so thoroughly that every metric goes to zero. A funnel break that kills everything teaches nothing — you want the stage-specific signature.

2. Breaking retrieval and then reading only the answer metric, which moves for every kind of break.

3. Forgetting to restore state between breaks, so break three is measured on top of break two.

How to ask here

Post the numbers you got, the config that produced them, and what you already tried.
A question with a measurement in it gets answered in one round trip; a question without one
takes three.

If you have finished it, post the write-up in Show and Tell with the
[solution · EX-03] prefix rather than here — this thread stays for people who are stuck.