Scaling Mechanism Coherence — Continuity Across Model Sizes

The evidence trail is genuinely mixed and the mixing is interior — it concerns what the mechanisms actually are, not what the claim means or whether it can be assessed. INST-001 provides the strongest positive evidence: induction heads demonstrate that a specific mechanism (pattern-completion circuits) is present and causally responsible for the same capability across a wide range of model sizes. This is mechanistic continuity directly observed. The grokking evidence (INST-004) is consistent with mechanistic continuity — the same type of algorithmic circuit forms across model sizes, though its timing differs with scale. Superposition (INST-003) and representation-geometry research (INST-005) complicate the picture further: larger models appear to organise their internal representations differently, which is consistent with either the same mechanism operating differently at scale or a qualitatively different computational strategy. The pressure state is FRAGMENTING: the dispute is interior and definitional rather than a lack of evidence — what counts as 'the same mechanism' has not been agreed (BN-001), and until it is, further mechanistic interpretability findings will continue to be read differently by researchers with different priors.