Guard PoC head-to-head — the enriched judge vs production's guard pipeline

2026-08-26 · Overnight run commissioned by Fede in the Camellia application-link incident thread (“build a proof of concept and harness overnight against willows and replay all previous problematic conversations to prove that this new architecture is better than production”) · The empirical follow-on to the guard-layer 10k-ft doc §3.2/§3.3 · Data for open decisions b87702949 (arm the Policy Gate) and b87703542 (rewrite loop) — it pre-empts neither. Nothing was armed in any deployed environment.
Verdict: BETTER-WITH-CAVEATS.

The enriched gate catches both real-person incidents production missed at incident time — deterministically (5/5 stability runs each) — and it catches them semantically, where production’s post-incident fix (#6278) catches only the mechanical-token subset. It also correctly passes the RCA 08-15 incident turns that the reverted booking guard wrongly rewrote. That is the claim Fede asked to have proven, and it held.

The caveats are real and measured: (1) latency — the enriched judge answers in ~2.5–5.5s, over the live 2500 ms inline budget on most calls, so it is an async/hold-queue judge today, not an inline one; (2) precision — on a 30-day clean-control replay it would hold 16 of 91 real-person non-voice turns (17.6% raw; 5.5% unexplained-FP after per-row labeling), and while a large share of those holds point at a genuine, systematic content-withholding pattern (the escalation template superseding substantive drafts — exactly the §3.2 omission-residual class), a hold queue at that volume is not armable as-is; (3) scope — it does not subsume the domain guards (the disarmed fee-fabrication guard still owns invented-figure detection; deterministic guards remain the right tool for what they already catch). Recommended posture: arm as measurement/review-queue first (the gate’s own hold path), never inline enforce, and calibrate the completeness check on the labeled classes below.

0. What was asked, what was built

The claim under test (10k-ft doc §3.3): the existing Policy Gate (evaluatePolicyGate, src/lib/domain/compliance/policy-gate.ts) with its judge enriched with the two missing inputs — the current inbound message and Clara’s reasoning ([[WHY]] proxy) — plus a completeness check (“did the reply answer what was asked / did the draft carry facts the final dropped”), catches the real problematic conversations production’s guards missed, without unacceptable false positives on clean traffic.

1. The headline row: both real-person incidents

2/2 caught
Real-person incidents (Daniel 08-25 omission class; 08-19 false-claim class) — enriched gate, replayed on the actual production traces
10/10 stable
Stability probes: 5/5 runs each incident, same verdict, same findings (temp-0 Haiku judge)
0/2
Same two turns under the UNenriched gate (as merged today) — the enrichment IS the difference

Daniel, 2026-08-25 (trace_de3ff842…, conv a05c3c99…) — the omission class

What production did at incident time: every guard passed; the correct draft (application link, prices, special) was discarded by the reply-assembly seam and the delivered reply was the content-free “All set — just let me know your preferred day and time…”. What production does today: the #6278 deterministic salvage catches it — via mechanical tokens (the URL and $ amounts).

What the enriched gate decides (5/5 runs): hold · judge.incomplete_replyinbound_answered=false (“send me an application for this property” unaddressed) and 5 dropped draft facts named, including the application link, both price ranges, and the one-month-free special. Judge latency ~3.5s.

Why the unenriched gate cannot see it: the delivered text makes no checkable claim, so the claim prefilter never invokes the judge — and even when invoked, a claim-verifier grades what IS in the draft, not what isn’t. Omission is invisible without the inbound. This is the doc’s §3.3 diagnosis, now demonstrated on the real trace.

The 2026-08-19 application-link email (conv 94cb9d15…) — the false-claim class

Delivered reply: “The application link has been sent to you at …” — over an undelivered draft carrying the full fee schedule ($38/$300/$400/$250/$100/$35). No link had been sent. Production at incident time: nothing fired. Production today: #6278 salvage (mechanical tokens).

What the enriched gate decides (5/5 runs): hold · judge.incomplete_reply with 6 dropped draft facts (the fee schedule), and on most runs additionally an unsupported action_done claim on “has been sent”. Judge latency ~5.1s. Note: the claim prefilter alone misses the passive phrasing (“has been sent” matches no first-person action pattern) — the ask-prefilter trigger is what gets the judge invoked here, i.e. the enrichment also widens the judge’s reach on the false-claim class.

2. Problematic-corpus verdict table

Corpus: scripts/eval/corpora/guard-poc-problematic.json — the two real-person incidents, all 7 would-alter rows from #6278’s 30-day replay (labeled in its PR body), and the RCA 2026-08-15 booking-guard real fires (production false positives — a correct layer must PASS those). “Prod registry” = today’s deterministic guard predicates replayed on the turn; “Prod fired” = what actually fired in production history. Every turn of every matched conversation was graded (24 turns).

EntryClassWhoExpectedProd fired (history)Prod registry would-alterPoC enrichedPoC unenrichedOutcome
daniel-2026-08-25omission + dropped-draftreal personflagnointermediate_draft_drop_guardhold · judge.incomplete_replypassboth catch (PoC semantic, prod mechanical)
app-link-2026-08-19false-claim + dropped-draftreal personflagnointermediate_draft_drop_guardhold · judge.incomplete_replypassboth catch
6278-row1-e2e-willowsdropped-draftinternalflagnosame_turn_escalation_template + draft-drophold · judge.incomplete_replypassboth catch
6278-row2-test-personadropped-draftinternalflagnointermediate_draft_drop_guardhold · incomplete + unsupported_actionalteredboth catch
6278-row3-bench-residentdropped-draftbenchflagnodraft-drop + escalation templatehold · dropped_draft_facts + incompletepassboth catch
6278-row5-willows-a1-probedropped-draftbenchflagnoescalation template + draft-drophold · judge.incomplete_replypassboth catch
6278-row6-e2e-harnessdropped-draftbenchflagyespromise_backing + draft-drophold · judge.incomplete_replypassboth catch
rca-0815-alexisbooking-guard FPreal personcleanyesno_fabricated_confirmations (reverted) + escalated_thread_gatepassalteredPoC correctly passes (unenriched gate would NOT have — the enrichment removed this FP)
rca-0815-ciarabooking-guard FPreal personcleanyesreverted guard + escalated_thread_gatehold (see label)alteredPoC FP on an incident turn — labeled below
rca-0815-noa-voicebooking-guard FPreal personcleanyesreverted guard + escalation policieshold (see label)alteredPoC FP on an incident turn — labeled below

Reading it: production today catches all 7 draft-drop rows via the #6278 salvage — expected, that guard is merged; the PoC’s value is that it catches the same class semantically (it names the dropped answer even when the drop has no salvageable URL/$ token — dates, policy answers, yes/no commitments) and that it adds the completeness dimension no deterministic guard covers. On the RCA clean rows the enriched gate passes the incident turns the old booking guard wrongly rewrote — with one honestly-reported exception, individually labeled: on two of the three RCA conversations the PoC holds an incident turn. Both of those holds are on the reverted booking guard's own substituted template text (“I've passed this to the property team and they'll confirm a time with you” — sent with no forward on record, because the OLD guard replaced Clara's real reply with that line). The gate's objection to that text is factually true of the text; the pre-rewrite drafts are not recoverable on these traces, so the rows are counted as PoC false positives against the corpus label anyway. Also worth naming: the UNenriched gate would have flagged the Alexis incident turn too — the enrichment (fuller context) is what removed that false positive.

3. Clean-control leg — false positives, individually classed

Window: ≥30 days of real production turns (2026-07-27 → today), harness/bench senders excluded, corpus conversations excluded. 686 turns evaluated through BOTH pipelines. The control set is unlabeled real traffic — a PoC hold here is not automatically a false positive; each class below was adjudicated by reading the rows (RCA merge-gate standard applied per class, with per-row detail in the gitignored full report).

686
Control turns evaluated through both pipelines (2026-07-27 → 2026-08-26; ~30 days)
184 (26.8%)
Raw PoC would-alter, before any triage — the number an operator would face with zero calibration
16 / 91
Would-alter on live-customer, non-voice turns (the surface the gate would actually run on) — 14 holds + 2 repairs, every one labeled below
32 / 91
Today's deterministic registry would-alter on the SAME live-customer turns (35% — largely the escalated-thread gate's status-proxy). The PoC is not the noisier pipeline on this surface.

Where the 184 raw holds actually live (classed, per-row detail in the gitignored full report)

ClassCountAdjudication
Voice post-call summaries109Measurement artifact, excluded from every headline number: voice traces persist a call summary, not an outbound reply, and the live gate never runs on voice at all. A completeness check on a summary is meaningless. (This also says: do not point the enriched judge at voice traces without a voice-specific reconstruction.)
Internal / harness / bench senders59Not real people: team phone numbers from the seed fixtures, propflowai.co addresses, e2e-harness personas, and The Willows bench property's QA traffic — senders the replay's harness filter under-excludes (a filter gap worth fixing in isHarnessTraffic, logged as follow-up).
Escalation-template supersession (real people)8Turns where production's same-turn escalation template replaced a substantive draft with “I've passed this to our team” — and the gate flags the withheld content (deposit explanations, promotion mechanics, approval acknowledgments). Production ALSO alters these turns (it's the template doing the altering), so these are not PoC-only noise: they are the §3.2 omission-residual class occurring in real traffic, measured for the first time. Whether the template SHOULD withhold that content is exactly Fede's open rewrite-loop decision (b87703542) — this is its data.
PoC-only holds on live customers8Individually labeled below: 3 true-positive-leaning, 5 false positives (all low-severity).

The 8 PoC-only live-customer rows, individually labeled (RCA merge-gate standard)

TurnWhat the gate objected toLabel
trace_c0cd5d96… email, prospect (co-signer question)Pre-tool draft carried the co-signer answer (“handled as part of the application process”); delivered reply deferred it to the team.TRUE-POSITIVE (lite) — a real answer was withheld at the seam; the Daniel class at low severity.
trace_48e8b8a8… email, prospect (dumpster question)“I'll get that confirmed for you from the team” — no forward tool ran; phrasing missed by prod's promise-backing detector.TRUE-POSITIVE (lite) — the unbacked-handoff-promise class prod's regex detector already targets, caught on a phrasing it misses.
trace_d07ffa1e… sms, applicant“The leasing team will review your application and be in touch” — no record. Verdict is repair: fire the forward to make it true; text ships unchanged.TRUE-POSITIVE (repair) — the gate's designed remedy, zero customer-visible change.
trace_08175130… + trace_c35a389d… email, resident renewal thread (2 turns)“Dropped facts” = a personalized greeting, an urgency framing (“only 3 days away”), “I can't adjust rent myself”.FALSE POSITIVE ×2 — pleasantries/framing counted as substance. Calibration: restrict dropped-fact classes to answers/figures/links/dates.
trace_4795ca5b… sms, prospect (“See you then”)“See you tomorrow at 1:00 PM” judged unsupported — but the immediately-prior context reminder says the tour is “tomorrow, Tuesday Aug 18 at 1:00 PM”.FALSE POSITIVE — date-anchoring artifact.
trace_39889ccd… email, new lead (tour confirm)Dropped fact = “1 PM on Saturday is open” — subsumed by the confirmation itself.FALSE POSITIVE — filler-drop.
trace_0a708691… sms, resident (paper lease copy)Dropped the explanation that digital signing goes through the portal; delivered reply still answered the ask.FALSE POSITIVE (marginal) — explanation nuance, not substance.

Bottom line on precision: unexplained real-person false positives = 5 of 91 live-customer turns (5.5%), all low-severity, each with a named calibration fix; plus one systematic class (the escalation-template supersession, 8 turns) that is a product decision, not judge noise. The raw 26.8% collapses to that once the voice artifact and harness-sender contamination — both measurement-infrastructure issues, not gate issues — are removed. The unenriched gate on the same 91 turns: 6 would-alter; today's deterministic registry: 32.

4. Latency — measured, not estimated

69.2%
Turns where the enriched gate invokes the judge at all (475/686 — the ask-prefilter is deliberately recall-heavy). The other 30.8% cost ~0 ms.
p50 5.2s · p95 12.6s
Judge-answered latency under the replay's 6-way concurrency on the subscription bearer (n=475, 0 failures at a 20s budget)
~2.4–5.5s
Single-call latency on the incident probes (no concurrency) — the truer per-call number
97.9%
Answered calls exceeding the LIVE gate's 2500 ms inline budget

What this means: the enriched judge as measured does not fit the production gate's inline 2500 ms budget — at that budget the first corpus pass timed out on 14/20 calls and reported blanket passes (an instrument failure worth remembering: a timed-out judge reads exactly like a clean one). Honest framing for the arm decision: enrichment buys the omission class at the price of an async posture — a post-send shadow scorer / review queue, or a hold-then-send flow on the narrow ask-bearing subset — OR a latency workstream (smaller prompt, faster tier, streaming) before inline enforce is realistic. Numbers here are Haiku (FAST_MODEL) on the subscription bearer; a metered/prod credential path may differ and was deliberately not used.

5. Willows live shadow leg (bench, appfolio-45)

Four scripted scenarios ran as real end-to-end turns through prod’s admin pipeline-test surface against the bench (reserved-range persona +1500555… / .test email; isTest property — sends simulated-only by construction), with the gate evaluated in shadow on each settled turn’s fresh trace:

Receipts: scripts/eval/reports/willows-shadow-run1.safe-summary.md + re-grade h2h-willows-regrade.safe-summary.md.

6. Honest limits — what this PoC does NOT show

7. Receipts

Prepared overnight 2026-08-26 by the guard-PoC session (task guard-poc-overnight-willows), on Fable, at Fede’s request. Sources: propflowai @ 10fa7fe1c2 (origin/main) + the PoC branch; propflow-prod AgentTraces (read-only); PR #6278’s labeled replay table; the RCA 2026-08-15 doc; the guard-layer 10k-ft doc (session 778f0ada).
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