A measurement study finds that 26 semantic post-hoc operators do not improve held-out accuracy over Best-of-N in frozen small code models. While some operators reduce compute usage or recover correct programs, none outperform BoN in accuracy, due to systemic limitations like coverage walls and consensus traps. An expression-layer recovery (M1) improves performance on HumanEval+ by 12 tasks, with no harm or leakage, and shows consistent results across model cells.