"Verify the Mechanism Is Firing" — It Had Never Been Deployed
A client operates two businesses under one legal entity, at two addresses. Supplier invoices arrive by email and have to be attributed to the right one. The mechanism to do that had been designed, written and documented. The task on my desk was a diagnostic: confirm it’s firing, and if it’s mostly falling through to the AI fallback, find out why. The spec proposed a sensible first step — count how many invoices were resolved by the database lookup versus guessed by the model. I ran it. The answer was zero and zero. ...