Interlock

Results: how many refund requests still need a person

Generated by experiments/approval_inbox.py (seed 4471). A synthetic day of 100 refund requests. The mix is an assumption, not measured data; so are reviewer latency (exponential, mean 90 min) and the routing. Change them and re-run.

Goal: cut two thirds of manual agent approvals. On this synthetic day, whose mix is an assumption and not measured data, 65 of 95 requests cleared with no person, 65 of those with receipts that verify.

system reviews a person did orders refunded the wrong amount
everyone approves 100 10
rules only 25 10
rules + Interlock 36 0

Scoreboard (derived from the journal)

measure value
requests (unique) 95
cleared with no person 65
of those, receipts that verify 65
share cleared with no person 0.684
sent after a person approved 12
escalated 32
rejected 18
stale approvals caught 5
crash cases sent to a person 0
repairs suggested 7
repairs accepted 2
SLA breaches 3
still open 0
time to decision, median 104 min
time to decision, p90 302 min
time to decision, max 409 min

Crash cases reach a person only when recovery cannot settle them. Every crash in this mix hits a tier 1 target recovery can settle, so none did; a tier 3 target would send them to payments-ops.

Mix

Why rules + Interlock still sent things to a person

Escalations by reason from the journal, once per trip to a person (SLA moves and re-shown items not counted). This includes each accepted repair’s own escalation. When the person who accepted the repair belongs to the group its new amount routes to, they approve it at once and it is not a review above; otherwise that group reviews it like any other item. So it can exceed the list above:

Reading it

Rules take routine requests off people’s plates, but without the gate they pay out wrong whenever the facts changed between the decision (or the approval) and the send: support had already refunded it by hand. Idempotency keys cannot see that. The gate re-checks the facts and the approver’s authority right before sending, refuses, and sends the item back to the group it is routed to, saying what changed and what would still be safe to send. A suggested repair is a new decision with its own receipt, never the refused one sent with a new amount.