Lighthouse scores that don't drift with your laptop's thermals

Your Lighthouse score is 94 on your MacBook on battery, 71 on the CI runner that happens to share a host with someone's test suite, and 88 on the same runner an hour later. Nobody trusts the number, so nobody defends the budget.

You run Lighthouse against the browser service in your container instead, pointed at the instance's DevTools WebSocket. The Chromium lives on bare metal you rent. No hypervisor neighbor borrows its cores mid-audit. Run it after every deploy and the score moves when the bundle moves, not when the weather does.

The report lands in the files service with the commit hash in the name, so the budget has a history, not a screenshot in a PR comment.

A performance budget is only a budget if the meter holds still.