FLA Optimization Loop Skill

Use this when you are making an existing fla/ops/** kernel faster — or bringing a new kernel from correct to fast — across more than one iteration, in any FLA backend language (Triton, Gluon, TileLang, CuTe DSL). This skill is the search discipline that ties the other skills together; it does not replace them:

• fla-nvidia-performance — how to profile (NCU), hardware baselines, MR-ready perf evidence.
• fla-ascend-performance — how to profile (torch_npu), diagnose Cube/Vector/MTE/UB bottlenecks, and optimize Triton-Ascend kernels.
• fla-correctness-coverage — how to design the test coverage matrix for an op.
• fla-mr-readiness — how to package the promoted change into a PR.

This skill covers the loop around those: what to lock, how to iterate, what to record, and when to stop.

0. The inviolable rule: the test file is a frozen contract

The op's tests/ops/test_<op>.py and its fla/ops/<op>/naive.py reference are frozen for the entire optimization loop. The whole point of "faster" only means something if correctness — forward and backward, under the conftest NaN-memory poisoning — is held fixed. During a perf loop you may not:

• edit the test file, or its naive.py reference;
• loosen an assert_close tolerance, or widen rms_eps / dtype to make a diff pass;
• drop, narrow, or skip parametrized shapes;
• special-case the kernel on values it only sees in the test;
• cache module-level tensors so trials reuse warm/identical data.

Run the gate with the unmodified test, every iteration:

python -m benchmarks.ops.verify --op <op> [--gate-k <subset>]

verify.py runs the pytest file as a black box and refuses to report a speedup on a red gate. --gate-k only selects a shape subset for a fast signal — it never edits the test; promote only on a full (no -k) green gate.

Banned vs. allowed implementation (anti-reward-hacking):

If you genuinely believe a test is wrong, that is a separate PR with its own justification — never bundled into a perf change. Stop and ask the user.

1. Write the task contract first (before any code)

Put a short docs/draft.md in your scratch workspace (see §6) stating:

• Op + entry point — e.g. chunk_gla in fla.ops.gla.
• Target — which shapes (from benchmarks/ops/registry.py SHAPE_CONFIGS), and a target speedup vs. main.
• Allowed languages — Triton / Gluon / TileLang / CuTe (state any constraint).
• Validation command — python -m benchmarks.ops.verify --op <op> (the frozen gate).
• Benchmark command — python -m benchmarks.ops.verify --op <op> --base main.
• Promotion criteria — full green gate, a measured repeatable win, and a profiler reading that explains it (§7).
• Frozen scope — the test file, naive.py, and the public op signature.

Do not start editing kernels until the draft exists. (Borrowed from KDA: plan, then execute.)

2. Three phases

Run these in order; repeat 2 and 3 with progressively higher targets.

• Phase 1 — correct baseline. Confirm the current kernel passes the full gate, and record baseline numbers: python -m benchmarks.ops.verify --op <op> --base main. For a brand-new kernel, get the gate green first; performance is secondary here.
• Phase 2 — profile-guided optimization. Use fla-nvidia-performance for NCU evidence on NVIDIA backends, or fla-ascend-performance for Ascend NPU / Triton-Ascend backends. Enumerate candidate directions, rank them by expected benefit vs. implementation risk, and explore each for at most a few iterations. Keep, revise, or reject each with evidence — don't optimize blindly.
• Phase 3 — shape specialization. Only when profiling shows different bottlenecks across shape regimes (short vs. long T, small vs. large D), add dispatch / specialized paths. Justify the added complexity with the measured win; validate on the full shape set, not the one you tuned on. Record each bucket (condition / entry point / per-bucket latency + speedup / reason) in dispatch.md (template in references/opt-log-template.md) — a specialized path without that evidence is unjustified complexity.

3. Iteration protocol

Every iteration is exactly three steps, in order, with no telescoping into the next iteration between them:

1. Make one change to the kernel.
2. Run verify.py — gate must stay green; record the bench number.
3. Append one row to OPT_LOG.md (see references/opt-log-template.md) and git commit.

A failed or no-change iteration is still an iteration: log it and commit before debugging the next direction. (Borrowed from AKO4ALL: bench → log → commit, the most-skipped step in practice.)

Stall handling. After 3 consecutive iterations with no improvement (≥ a few % over current best, above noise), stop and re-assess: re-profile, re-read OPT_LOG.md for which axes you've already tried, and search for known techniques for this op family before picking a new direction.

When to stop. A user-set iteration cap is reached; or re-assessment produces hard evidence of a floor (bandwidth-bound at HBM limit, launch-overhead dominated, timer-resolution limited — cite it in OPT_LOG.md); or you've documented ≥3 distinct directions tried with evidence. Don't stop silently because a tool (e.g. NCU) was unavailable — that's a re-assessment input.

No-go bar. If stopping means concluding there's no win to promote — a no-go — that verdict has its own bar: a first candidate losing doesn't clear it. A no-go needs a recorded baseline number, at least one reasoned candidate attempt (not a blind guess), the gate status, the bench evidence, and a named active bound or blocker (name which roofline/launch/timer limit, with the number). Without those five it's an unfinished loop.

4. Reproducibility

• Seed — the tests already pin torch.manual_seed(42); don't undermine it.
• Environment — verify.py prints GPU / CUDA / PyTorch / Triton / commit SHA; paste that line into OPT_LOG.md so a number is interpretable later.
• Full-shape verdict before promotion — a --gate-k subset is a signal only.
• Rank by the solution's own runtime for fast iteration signal; pay for the full --base main comparison only at the verdict. Clock noise on unlocked GPUs can swing absolute speedup — see references/TRAPS.md.

5. Silent-bug & measurement traps

Read references/TRAPS.md before trusting any number. It catalogs FLA-specific traps (NaN poisoning on partial writes, TF32 inflating fp32 reference diffs, assert_close relative tolerance, one-sided numeric-flag relaxation, autotune-cache staleness across edits, int64 address arithmetic, implausible speedups that signal a silently-skipped path). When you hit a new one, add it there with Fact / Why / How to apply so the next session doesn't re-learn it. (Borrowed from AKO4X's TRAPS.md.)

6. Evidence records (scratch workspace)

Keep your search artifacts in a git-ignored directory — profile/<op>-opt/ is already ignored:

profile/<op>-opt/
  docs/draft.md       # the task contract (§1)
  OPT_LOG.md          # one row per iteration (template in references/)
  dispatch.md         # one row per shape bucket — only if Phase 3 specializes (template in references/)
  TRAPS.md            # traps you hit this session (seed: references/TRAPS.md)
  trace/              # torch.profiler / NCU artifacts (kept out of git)

Each kept candidate's kernel gets a short header (Identity / Delta / Lessons / Dead-ends / Open-directions) per references/opt-log-template.md, so a later session can see what was tried and why.

7. Promotion → MR

A candidate is promotable only on a full green gate plus a measured, repeatable win on the target shapes, and a profiler/roofline reading that explains the win (or, for a no-go, the blocker) — a speedup you can't account for is a silent-skip suspect, not a result (see §5). Then:

• Keep the diff minimal — change only what the win needs, plus light cleanups (CONTRIBUTING "Protect battle-tested paths; keep diffs minimal").
• Collect perf evidence per backend skill — fla-nvidia-performance (before/after, NCU summary, dense + varlen coverage) or fla-ascend-performance (before/after, pipe/UB metrics, round summary template) — and a full final-claim stats block (median/mean/std/min/p10/p90 per shape, equal-weight geomean speedup, exact commands, baseline commit + candidate SHA, GPU id/model with idle-clock evidence — the last guards the clock-drift trap in §5).
• Package the PR per fla-mr-readiness.

The scratch workspace under profile/<op>-opt/ stays local; it is not part of the PR.