0018: The event pipeline is the only way the office decides

Status: accepted. Makes 0016 the office’s only decision path and replaces the rules, presets and templates of 0011; the status mapping of 0011 stays. 0019 has agents make their acts. Its point that a woken agent moves its own ticket to active is replaced by 0020.

Context

The office ran two decision paths: the workflow engine, with its presets, rules and the policies switches that rewrote them, and the event pipeline beside it, off, in shadow mode or live (office.pipeline). Shadow mode compared the two on every event and did its job: the differences it showed are known. Keeping both meant every behaviour had two implementations, the engine had side effects outside its rules, and chat had a routing path of its own.

Decision

• The pipeline decides on every event, always. office.pipeline is gone, and with it shadow mode, the engine-vs-pipeline comparison (ost explain --compare, the office link’s compare method and the engine and comparison fields of a trace) and the chat desk’s routing. A chat message is a chat.message event like any other; the desk keeps the backend of the chat session’s verbs and the reports.
• The engine is gone: its presets, rules, templates and the switches that only edited rules. workflow.preset, workflow.rules, workflow.templates, policies.feedback.merged_prs, doc_comments, ticket_comments, mentions, policies.hand_back.reassign, policies.conflicts, policies.retry.on_signal and policies.tickets.start_moves_active are removed keys: ost validate names what replaces each, usually pipeline.policies.<id>.enabled: false. The condition evaluator and the status mapping stay; the pipeline uses them.
• No hidden side effects. What the engine did outside its rules is a policy, the agent’s own work, or gone:
  • moving a ticket to active when its work starts, and assigning an attached ticket back to the agent, are the agent’s: a woken agent takes its ticket back and moves it to active itself, as its catalog instructions say;
  • retrying a blocked item on a human’s signal is gone: the signal wakes the agent with a new round through the policies, and blocked items a later finished round made moot are closed;
  • joining queued or running work is the pipeline’s: a wake joins an item of the same kind and subject (a chat message only a session that has not started), and coalescing folds close wakes;
  • follow-up rounds for feedback that came after an offer stay, as office bookkeeping that decides nothing;
  • hand-backs are the hand_back_done and hand_back_blocked policies.
• The office acts only for agents. Every tracker change is an act for the agent it serves. Today the office still makes it with its own tracker account and a note naming the agent, as 0016 recorded; making each act with the agent’s own tracker identity, so the office’s tracker account can be read-only, is the next step and needs a way to reach an agent’s tracker credentials when no agent runs.

Consequences

• One implementation of each behaviour, and every decision is traced. A gap is fixed in the pipeline, each as its own change: a blocked hand-back no longer wakes the PM to unblock it (the ticket goes to the requester), a mention no longer hands the ticket over by itself, and a pull request a human opens or merges leaves its ticket unmoved, since there is no agent to act for.
• The replay of acme events (packages/office/src/pipeline/replay) shows the pipeline’s decisions only, against a golden file.
• Agents do more of their own ticket bookkeeping: taking the ticket back and moving it to active when they start.
• Not yet met: the office’s tracker history still shows changes the office made for agents.