In-Flight Triage

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{
  "title": "In-Flight Triage",
  "slug": "in-flight-triage",
  "objectNumber": 13,
  "version": "1.0",
  "status": "published",
  "source": "\"Nobody Owns the Specification\" (standalone tentpole, draft v17, \"Your Agents Have Owners. Your Policy Has No Author.\")",
  "sourceArticleUrl": "https://medium.com/enterprise-experience-architecture/your-agents-have-owners-your-policy-has-no-author-8d8f7264d3f4",
  "summary": "The named procedure for a state the State Inventory missed mid-sprint: the discovery is logged immediately, never silently absorbed into the sprint's existing plan; the discovering squad proposes a severity but does not get to confirm its own proposal; confirmation against constraint-library precedent is fast, a lookup, not a meeting; confirmation with no precedent is deliberately slower, by design. CRITICAL or HIGH holds the surface touching that state until the constraint is at least drafted; MEDIUM or below ships on schedule and backfills the constraint in parallel. Presumes the Specification Authorship Record's four questions (Standard object 12) already exist for the manifest in question — not usable standalone.",
  "lastUpdated": "2026-09-09",
  "changelog": [
    {
      "date": "2026-09-09",
      "version": "1.0",
      "note": "Published (Build Ledger item 52), in the same commit as Object 12 since this object is not independently backfillable. The article's live Medium URL is confirmed by direct fetch — title, byline, and publish timestamp all match. `sourceArticleUrl` set to that confirmed URL. Status/version flip only — no content changes in this entry, matching Object 3's, Object 6's, Object 7's, and Object 11's own draft-to-published precedent (0.x drafts flip to 1.0 on publish, regardless of the draft's own last minor version). Per Build Ledger item 48, the reciprocal cross-link decision was scoped to Object 12 only — this object gains no new backlinks in this pass."
    },
    {
      "date": "2026-09-09",
      "version": "0.2",
      "note": "Content reconciliation against v17 (Build Ledger item 50). Formal line-by-line re-verification: the proposal/confirmation split, the fast-path/slow-path branch, and the CRITICAL/HIGH-vs-MEDIUM disposition rule all check out unchanged against v17. Two discrepancies found, neither anticipated by this pass's own scoping prompt, both reconciled: Step 4's \"cross-domain precedent / co-signature\" resolution mechanism has no v17 source and was reworded to what v17 actually states (a genuinely new shape requires the slower path, deliberately, without specifying its resolution mechanism); `slaNote`'s \"published confirmation SLA with a named fallback signer\" assertion also has no v17 source for this object's ordinary-case path (a related but distinct mechanism exists in v17, but only for Object 12's emergency provisional-resumption path, and is not imported here) — reworded to state plainly that v17 no longer makes this assertion, rather than inventing a replacement or dropping the field silently. Still `status: \"draft\"`, still no `sourceArticleUrl` — this is a content pass only, not a publish-flip."
    },
    {
      "date": "2026-08-24",
      "version": "0.1",
      "note": "Initial authoring, staged as draft per every prior object's own practice of author review before a page goes live, and per Build Ledger item 46 / ProjectBrief v2.17's build-ahead-of-publication plan, built in the same branch and pass as Object 12 since this object is not independently backfillable. `sourceArticleUrl` deliberately omitted — the source article is not yet live, confirmed by pre-flight check, matching Object 5's deploy #1 pattern. The four-step procedure, the disposition rule, and the SLA/fallback-signer requirement are extracted directly from the article's own \"On the Thursday problem\" text. The SLA/fallback-signer structure is stated by the article only as an asserted requirement, not specified with a number or a named role — this object says so plainly rather than inventing either. The dependency on Object 12 is stated in this object's own intro copy, not silently assumed. Not yet published: pending author review of this object's own editorial framing, and pending the source article's Medium URL going live (the publish-flip trigger, Build Ledger item 46)."
    }
  ],
  "type": "reference",
  "tagline": "Fast for the common case. Deliberately slow for the one that earns it.",
  "inFlightTriage": {
    "steps": [
      {
        "title": "Log the discovery immediately",
        "description": "A squad finds a state the State Inventory missed mid-sprint. This is the normal case, not the exception, and the framework has a named answer for it. The discovery is logged immediately — never silently absorbed into the sprint's existing plan."
      },
      {
        "title": "Propose, don't confirm",
        "description": "Classification does not violate the no-self-grading rule, because it isn't a single step. The discovering squad proposes a severity; it does not get to confirm its own proposal."
      },
      {
        "title": "Confirm against precedent — the fast path",
        "description": "For the large majority of Thursday-afternoon discoveries, the state matches a shape the constraint library has already priced — a redetermination window, a residency boundary, a delegated-authority expiration. Confirming a proposal against precedent is a lookup, not a meeting. The squad is unblocked in minutes, not days."
      },
      {
        "title": "No precedent — the slow path",
        "description": "Only a genuinely new shape — one with no precedent to check against — leaves the fast path. That is deliberate, not a bottleneck: fast where a wrong call is cheap to catch, slow only where it isn't. Fast for the common case, deliberately slow for the rare one that earns it — that asymmetry is the design, not a loophole in it."
      }
    ],
    "dispositionRule": "Once confirmed: CRITICAL or HIGH holds the surface touching that state until the constraint is at least drafted, and nothing else in the sprint stops. MEDIUM or below ships on schedule, and the state enters a backfill queue the ratifying function clears in parallel. What this protects against is the two failure modes on either side of it: halting a revenue-carrying sprint for two weeks to backfill five columns, which is how organizations learn to route around the gate entirely — and silently shipping the new state under a \"fix it next sprint\" note, which is exactly the Provisional Surface pattern this piece opened with. The root only reopens for a change to what the manifest inherits from. A Thursday discovery on one surface does not touch it.",
    "slaNote": "An earlier draft of the source article asserted that a published confirmation SLA with a named fallback signer is what turns \"a lookup, not a meeting\" into a schedule rather than a hope. The current article no longer makes that assertion for this ordinary-case path — the fast/slow split it describes rests on whether precedent exists in the constraint library, not on a stated staffing structure. Without a published SLA and a named fallback signer, \"a lookup, not a meeting\" is still only a statement about how quickly one person answers email, and a distributed squad will learn that within a sprint. Flagged here rather than invented: the requirement is operationally real, but it is no longer sourced to article text.",
    "dependencyNote": "This procedure presumes the Specification Authorship Record's four questions (Standard object 12) already exist for the manifest in question — it confirms and drafts constraints against that existing record, and does not establish authorship from scratch. It is not usable standalone without it."
  }
}