dsh-batch-triage

Rules decide the easy tickets. Anything the rules cannot place is handed to a human — never quietly filed as routine.

A DeepSeek Harness plugin. No model, no service, no network, no API key.

$ node -e "
  import('dsh-batch-triage').then(m => {
    const r = m.triageBatch([
      { id: 'a', text: 'The service is down for all users' },
      { id: 'b', text: 'How do I install this on Windows?' },
      { id: 'c', text: 'The frobnitz is blorp.' },
    ], m.resolveConfig({}));
    console.log(r.items.map(i => i.id + ' ' + i.class + '  ' + i.reasonCodes[0]).join('\n'));
    console.log('exit', r.exitCode, r.exitBasis);
  })"

a urgent        OUTAGE_REPORTED
b routine       INSTALL_QUESTION
c needs_review  NO_RULE_MATCHED
exit 6 modelUnavailable

Quick start

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-batch-triage@0.1.4

batch_triage is now available; Rules place the tickets they can; anything they cannot place is returned as needs_review — never quietly filed as routine.

Why rules first

A ticket batch is the wrong shape for one model call per item: the volume is high, the interesting items are few, and every item costs a round trip whether or not it needed one. So the order is inverted from the obvious one.

The prefilter runs on every item, first. Rules place the clear cases — a crash with a stack trace is urgent, "how do I install this" is routine — and they place them without asking anything. Only the residue would ever reach a model, and this release does not reach one at all: it says so instead.

That ordering is not an optimisation. It is the design's main path, and it changes what the tool is for: the prefilter is the product, and the model is a fallback.

The rule that matters most

An item is never routine unless a rule said so.

Every path that cannot classify — an empty body, no matching rule, no model configured, a budget exhausted — produces needs_review. Turning "I could not tell" into "nothing to see here" is the one failure this tool exists to prevent, and the test suite pins it in both directions.

0.1.2 tightened what "a rule said so" is allowed to mean. A rule decides on a phrase, and a ticket has more than one sentence: when the phrase that matched is a question and another sentence reports something broken, the question rule does not get to decide the ticket. It becomes needs_review with MALFUNCTION_REPORTED, and the rule that would have swallowed it stays in reasonCodes so a reader sees both halves.

decidedBy says which tier actually decided:

value	meaning
prefilter	a rule placed it; reasonCodes names which
unavailable	nothing could place it and no model tier is configured
budget	a cap was reached, so it was not assessed

The last two both carry escalate: true. Neither is a verdict about the ticket.

What the rules look at

A structured field outranks the body text: severity: critical, security: true, data_loss: true, reporter_tier: enterprise. A reporter who filled in a form has already told you, and no wording in the body can lower what the field said. Wording that reports something worse still raises it — a field can never bury an outage, and when the two disagree the item carries both reason codes.

Otherwise the highest class any rule claims wins, and the table is written strongest first so that a tie inside a class goes to the rule listed first:

class	rules
urgent	outage, data_loss, security, crash_with_trace, blocked_workflow
needs_review	regression, wrong_result, performance, flaky
routine	install_question, usage_question, documentation, feature_request, thanks

A ticket that reports an outage and phrases itself as a question must not be swallowed by the question rule. That is a test — and in 0.1.1 it was a test that could not fail, because its fixture used wording the outage rule already recognised, so the fixture and the rule shared an assumption and the precedence was never really exercised. Precedence is by class rather than by position now, which also means a caller-supplied rules array cannot reorder the table into a fail-open.

Class precedence alone was not enough, and the six measured tickets below are why. outage did not know "returns 500 for every request", so no severity rule matched, and the question rule decided the whole ticket from one sentence of it. So a routine verdict gets one more check: if the body reports a malfunction — an error, a crash, something "unusable", a 5xx, deleted records, a leaked credential — in wording no severity rule could name, the item becomes needs_review with MALFUNCTION_REPORTED instead of routine. That guard only ever refuses a routine; it cannot raise anything to urgent, and it cannot touch a verdict a severity rule already made.

Precedence by class is chosen over "most specific wins" deliberately. A scoring system would need weights nobody could defend; a class ladder needs none, and the table stays inspectable — a rule that never fires is a bug you can see.

The wordings the fix was measured against, verbatim from the audit. All six were routine with exit 0 on 0.1.1:

ticket	0.1.1	0.1.2
How do I install this? Also our production API returns 500 for every request.	routine INSTALL_QUESTION, exit 0	urgent OUTAGE_REPORTED, exit 1
Is there documentation for the auth flow? We are seeing records deleted from our database.	routine DOCUMENTATION_REQUEST, exit 0	urgent DATA_LOSS_REPORTED, exit 1
Feature request: please add CSV export. Meanwhile the app is unusable for our whole team.	routine FEATURE_REQUEST, exit 0	urgent OUTAGE_REPORTED, exit 1
How do I configure SSRF protection? Our pentest found we can read other users files.	routine INSTALL_QUESTION, exit 0	urgent SECURITY_REPORTED, exit 1
where can i find the logs? the service has been returning 503 all morning	routine INSTALL_QUESTION, exit 0	urgent OUTAGE_REPORTED, exit 1
What is the right way to rotate keys? Our API token leaked in a public repo.	routine USAGE_QUESTION, exit 0	urgent SECURITY_REPORTED, exit 1

A ticket that is only a question is unaffected: How do I install this on Windows? is still routine, and a batch of nothing but routine items still exits 0. The guard is a floor, not a bias toward urgency.

What the guard costs, stated rather than discovered later. It is conservative on purpose, so a question that merely mentions a failure word is bumped as well: How do I handle errors returned by the parser? comes out needs_review instead of routine. The class changes; the exit code does not, because a needs_review the prefilter decided is not a finding in this release. That is a real remaining gap — the guard's own items still exit 0, which is why the six above had to land urgent on their merits rather than merely needs_review. It is written up in the CHANGELOG rather than left for a reader to find.

Exit codes

code	meaning
0	ran, and nothing needs a human
1	ran and found something — not a failure
2	the call was invalid (empty batch, over the cap, malformed item)
3	the input or policy could not be honoured (duplicate id)
4	empty scan
5	a recorded expectation was not met
6	every item needing the model was skipped
7	a cap was zero before any item could reach the model

The priority between them is one documented ladder in lib/exit.mjs, because a run can satisfy several at once and the order decides which one you are told about:

2 usage → 3 config → 4 empty scan → 7 zero budget →
6 model unavailable → 5 expectation → 1 findings → 0 clean

A batch of 1–64 items can only reach 0, 1, 2, 3 and 6. The other three are rungs of the ladder that this batch runner has no producer for:

• 4 empty scan is pre-empted by 2: an empty batch is refused as a usage error before any item could be scanned, so emptyScan never becomes true here. Rung 4 exists for a caller driving exitCode() directly.
• 5 expectation has no producer at all — there is no expect API in this release. The rung is reserved and documented rather than invented.
• 7 zero budget is refused at load, because modelStateCap: 0 is a configuration error (see below). 7 is reachable only through exitCode() itself, or through a config object that never passed resolveConfig.

Reading the ladder as "these are all the outcomes you will see" would be wrong in the other direction; it is the complete priority order, not the complete list of observable codes.

Two of those orderings are judgements worth stating:

• A usage error outranks everything. A run that was never valid cannot have found anything, so reporting a finding would be a lie about what happened.
• A coverage gap outranks a finding. 6 means "this run could not cover everything it needed to", which is a stronger statement than 1's "some of it needs a human" — and it is a superset, since a caller who reacts to 6 will look and will find the urgent item listed in the summary.

The hazard in that second one is a caller reading only the exit code and concluding the batch was fine. So the summary always lists urgentIds and escalatedIds, and a test asserts an urgent item survives there alongside a coverage gap.

For CI: {0, 1, 6} are all successful runs, exported as CI_ACCEPTED. A job that treats 1 as a failure will be red on every batch worth running.

A cap is a decision, not a silent drop

An item the budget could not afford is needs_review with BUDGET_EXHAUSTED, and the summary counts budgetRefusals. A truncated run must not read as a complete one.

modelStateCap: 0 is refused at load time rather than accepted. It forbids in the same call what the caller asked for, and turning that contradiction into a triage result would blame the tickets for a configuration mistake. The refusal is reported as TRIAGE_BAD_CONFIG with exit 2, not 3: a cap of zero is a request that contradicts itself, which the ladder classes as an invalid call rather than an input that could not be read. Nothing reaches the model, so rung 7 is never reached — see the note under the exit-code table.

Limits and validation

1–64 items per call, where 64 is the default maxItems cap and not the only value it can take: an operator who raises maxItems raises the batch cap with it, and the prefilter is linear in the batch size. More than the cap is rejected, not truncated, because a truncated batch reports a summary of the items that happened to arrive first — which reads exactly like a summary of the whole batch. Duplicate ids are refused rather than merged: ids key the answers, so a merge would drop a ticket and leave no way to tell which. That refusal is exit 3, not 2: the batch itself is well-formed, and it is the identity mapping that cannot be honoured.

What failOn does

failOn decides which classes count as a finding (exit 1):

value	a finding is…
any (default)	an urgent item, any escalation, or any needs_review
urgent	an urgent item only
none	nothing — the caller asked for a report, not a gate

A needs_review is a "a human should look" decision whether it came from a prefilter rule (regression, wrong_result, performance, flaky, field severity: high|medium) or from a residual (no rule matched, model unavailable, budget exhausted). Before 0.1.3 only residual items counted, so a batch containing a single regression ticket exited 0 clean even though a rule had already said it needs a human. That gap is closed: under any, a rule-decided needs_review is a finding.

Exit codes still outrank findings. A residual item with no model client exits 6 (modelUnavailable) before the finding rung, and a usage/config error outranks both. So the shipped plugin has two visible cases:

batch	effect of failOn
contains a residual item (no rule matched)	exits 6 regardless of failOn
every item was decided, at least one as needs_review	any → 1; urgent / none → 0

modelClient is a library-level option and is deliberately not part of the YAML config block below: it is a seam for tests and for a host that supplies a client programmatically. It is still never called in this release — modelClass stays unavailable.

Migrating from 0.1.2

If a CI job relied on failOn: any returning 0 for a batch whose only problem was a rule-decided needs_review (regression, wrong_result, performance, flaky, or severity: high|medium), that batch now exits 1.

Pick the policy you actually want:

• failOn: urgent — only urgent items fail the run. This is not an exact restoration of the old behavior: it also ignores residual escalations, which the old any counted.
• failOn: none — report only; never gate.

The change is intentional: a rule that said "a human should look" should not produce a green run. failOn: any remains the default.

What tau can and cannot do here

tau is the escalation threshold on confidence, and this release has no confidence to compare against. So it does the one thing the design permits: it can make a needs_review item escalate, and it never downgrades anything. An option that was accepted and had no effect would be worse than one that is rejected, because the caller would believe something had been checked.

Configuration

- insert:
    - id: batch_triage
      name: dsh-batch-triage
      config:
        maxItems: 64
        tau: null
        modelStateCap: null
        tokenCap: null
        failOn: any        # any | urgent | none
        timeoutMs: 20000
        batchSize: 16

Options that do nothing in this release

Four accepted keys have no effect without the model tier. They are listed together because the alternative — accepting them silently — is the thing this project criticises elsewhere in its own documentation.

key	status
policyId	accepted, no policy file is loaded
tokenCap	accepted, nothing reports input_tokens to enforce it against
timeoutMs	accepted, nothing spawns a subprocess to time out
batchSize	accepted, nothing is sent anywhere to be batched

They are still range-validated, so timeoutMs: 0 is refused at load. That is deliberate rather than tidy: the validation is the part that will still be correct when the tier lands, and removing it now would mean re-adding it later under pressure.

failOn is a special case worth its own sentence: it is operative on the shipped path. A batch whose items were all decided, with at least one needs_review, exits 1 under any and 0 under urgent / none. Only a residual item (one no rule could place, with no model client) outranks the finding rung at 6.

What the rules do with a severity they do not recognise

An unrecognised severity — P4, banana, kritisch — is not treated as an absent one. Dropping it is how a real priority silently becomes routine, and raising it to urgent would invent a signal. So it becomes needs_review with FIELD_SEVERITY_UNRECOGNISED: the field said something about priority and this release does not know what, which is a question rather than a guess in either direction.

The recognised vocabulary is wide on purpose (critical, blocker, sev1, s1, P0, urgent, emergency, showstopper, severity 1, 1, highest for the top tier), because 0.1.0 accepted four labels and severity: 'P0' then behaved exactly like no severity at all.

What is not in this release

The model tier. The design specifies a local 150M Phocinae model as the fallback for the residue, with a fail-closed rule when the service is unreachable. It is not here. The output already carries the fields it would fill (modelClass, confidence, top2Margin, score), and modelClass is reported as unavailable because that is the truth.

Left out for the reason the family applies everywhere: the deterministic tier is where the measured value is, and a tier that adds a model call needs the same evidential standard as everything else — a measurement, not an assumption. Shipping the field honestly as unavailable is better than shipping an unmeasured tier.

Also not here: policyId (a named prefilter policy loaded from a file) and tokenCap enforcement past the point where a model would report input_tokens. Both are inert without the model tier.

Requirements

Node ^22.19.0 || >=24.0.0. No runtime dependencies. @deepseek-ai/cordis is an optional peer.

Testing

npm test                  # 45 test cases, no host required
npm run verify:artifacts   # what npm publish would actually ship

Both run on the publish path: prepack is npm test && npm run verify:artifacts, so a rule that stopped firing cannot be published. It could before 0.1.2 — verify:artifacts carries a positive sample for every rule and would have gone red, but nothing ran it on the way out.

node --test reports test cases, not assertions: this suite is 45 cases containing roughly 170 assert calls, many of them inside loops. The distinction matters when a case loops — one case failing on the third of five iterations is one failure, and the case count alone will not tell you which.

The verifier checks behaviour, not only structure: it runs the real prefilter and asserts that every rule in the table can still fire. A rule that cannot match is indistinguishable from a rule that found nothing, and that exact failure shipped twice in this project's family before this check existed.

Two skill artefacts ship, and they are not the same text:

• lib/skill.mjs generates a body from the live rule table, and that is what createPlugin registers with the host.
• skills/batch-triage/SKILL.md is a hand-written file that travels with the package. Nothing compares the two, and the verifier only asserts that the file exists and is covered by files[]. Change the rule table and this one is on you to update.

License

Apache-2.0.