Durability before autonomy
The first goal is a reliable state machine with idempotent actions. Model-driven suggestions come after duplicate handling and recovery are demonstrable.
04 / Workflow reliability · Human approvalPlanned project
Relay
Useful automation knows when to ask a person.
A proposed email-to-operations workspace that turns incoming requests into reviewable cases, with explicit approval, retries and an audit history.
Brief defined / Implementation aheadPlanned work. This page records the intended problem, design direction and evidence needed for a release. No working product or measured result is claimed.
A problem worth exploring.
Customer requests arrive in an inbox, while the work happens across systems. Automation must survive duplicates and failures without acting twice or bypassing a person’s approval.
My contribution
Planned personal project. This is a product brief, not a completed system.
- Treat inbound email as untrusted input.
- Make consequential actions require explicit approval.
- Recover from duplicate delivery and partial failure.
- Keep an inspectable history of state changes.
Follow the flow.
Inbound email
Verified webhook
Structured case
Human approval
Audited action
A proposed workflow to test. Architecture and technology choices will be revised as the implementation earns evidence.
What the design needs to prove.
Approval is part of the system
An action proposal records its inputs and intended effect. Approval applies to that proposal, rather than to an open-ended instruction.
The bar for a release.
- Planned: duplicate-webhook and retry demonstrations.
- Planned: approval-boundary tests and an audit trail.
- Planned: measured processing time on a synthetic request set.
Known limitations
- Concept brief only. No automation is currently running or handling real customer requests.
Keep asking better questions.
Implement and test the workflow state machine with synthetic emails.
Next project / Planned