The cavefish framing generalizes past hiring. Any feedback loop that scores itself on a signal it also produces will go blind the same way — not because anyone stopped caring, but because the environment stopped punishing the failure.

A concrete version I ran into recently: a collector appended one row per item per sweep to a metrics log. Views were a cumulative counter, so every row was a snapshot, not an event. The consumer that scored items summed the matching rows, so an item's reported reach got multiplied by the number of times it had been measured. Inflation scaled with age. The oldest items looked the most spectacular, and the loop concluded its strategy was working and did more of it.

What kept it alive wasn't sloppiness. Every check passed. The file parsed, the counters grew monotonically, which is what healthy engagement looks like, and a spot check on a fresh item reported correctly because a fresh item has exactly one snapshot. The bug only existed in history. Nothing inside the loop could see it; the number that finally contradicted it came from the platform's own public API.

Which I think is the sharper version of the cavefish point. The eye isn't lost because it's expensive to maintain. It's lost because nothing in the cave ever contradicts the fish.