Define the lab goal and success criteria

Start by drawing the boundary around a webhook-to-LLM support triage workflow with a human-approved outbound action. The unit under control is not “the model”; it is one repeatable transaction from WebhookEvent with event_id, signature, occurred_at, ticket_id, text, and dry_run to TriageDecision with category, urgency, confidence, evidence, proposed_action, and approval_required. In this lab, a ticket webhook is delivered three times and the model marks an ambiguous message as urgent. That makes the learning target observable: we can replay the transaction, record the same fields, and decide whether a release is safer than its baseline. The primary decision metric is correct actions per unique event. The release rule is zero duplicate sends, at least 0.90 triage precision, and 100% approval for outbound messages. Those values are deliberately paired: a single average cannot hide a critical subgroup or a security escape.

Write the failure before writing implementation code. Our named reproduction is: the retry handler posts three Slack alerts because idempotency is recorded after the side effect. A useful reproduction contains a frozen input, an expected decision, the release identifier, and enough deterministic dependencies to rerun locally. It must not depend on a live customer, changing clock, or unrestricted provider account. The fixture below is synthetic but shaped like production. Keep it in version control and add a case whenever an incident exposes a missing behavior.

Success has three levels. A request-level assertion explains one example. An aggregate metric catches drift over many examples. An operational rule says who acts and how quickly. Here, workflow_action_total records the aggregate, while the request artifact carries a correlation ID. The owner should be able to move from an alert to the exact failing fixture without searching raw prompts. The security boundary is equally explicit: verify webhook signatures before parsing; the model proposes actions but cannot send externally.

The deliverable is a one-page acceptance contract plus the first red test. Do not tune a model yet; uncertainty about the contract is the bug to remove on this page.

Use the fixture above as the first row of an acceptance table. Add columns for expected decision, prohibited side effect, severity, policy version, and evidence to retain. The failure statement—the retry handler posts three Slack alerts because idempotency is recorded after the side effect—must be falsifiable: a teammate should know exactly which assertion turns red. Write the baseline result before trying a candidate so improvement is comparative rather than anecdotal.

Now calculate correct actions per unique event by hand for a three-case toy set: one pass, one ordinary failure, and one critical failure. Apply the published gate, zero duplicate sends, at least 0.90 triage precision, and 100% approval for outbound messages, without rounding. This exposes whether weighting, critical-case overrides, and empty slices behave as intended. Emit workflow_action_total once for the toy run and verify that its labels contain a bounded release and outcome, never fixture text.

The lab is ready only when its fixture is synthetic, its dangerous actions are replaced by recording fakes, and its evidence can be retained safely. The expected incident response is to record the proposal transactionally, request human approval, and execute once with an idempotency key. Assign that decision to a role, not “the team,” and state which artifact proves recovery.