Chapter 18 · agent-neuron · Lab
On call
A newer alert withdraws the ask a person is still reading, the late answer is refused, and the newer ask takes the place of the old.
A decision goes stale mid-read
Two alerts land on one person’s desk: a latency alarm with a restart proposed, and a disk warning with a cache clear. Kit opens the payments ask first and starts reading the dashboards toward the restart. The decision is being made slowly, as an on-call decision is.
Then a newer payments alert arrives, the error rate since a deploy, and the open ask leaves the desk: withdrawn, its replacement (a rollback) in its place. Kit answers the withdrawn ask anyway; the desk refuses it, 410, because the situation it was about has been replaced. The newer ask is answered in its turn, and the act neuron carries the rollback out.
The rule it proves
No rule is new here: staleness is SPEC 5.4 as the network file has always carried it. A signal with a replaces key makes the older signal of the same key stale on arrival; the waiting work is dropped as replaced, an answer arriving for stale work is discarded, and nothing is forwarded. The demo carries that one rule onto the desk, so the item a person is reading goes with its input.
The person is a human neuron (3.4, decision 0008), and the desk’s POST answers nothing it has withdrawn. The newer ask is not a queue behind the old one; it is the old one’s replacement, which is what a replaces key means (4.1). The refusal is the honest answer to a question that has moved on.
Run it
npm run demo oncall -- --headless --pace 3 # the withdrawal, the refused late answer, the replacementWhat it is not
Not a pager: the alerts are invented, there is no rotation and no schedule, and a withdrawn ask does not come back unless the source speaks again.