Grounding Integrity Gate

What was built & why

PR#10 fixed unverified changes and rigid phone routing in the riff repo. You implemented the Grounding Integrity Gate to catch false positives in affirmation detection. The new phone_server logic injects prior-call context for per-number flow selection. A global JSON-backed preference store now validates flow quality across L1-L4 testing levels.

Principles

• Gate flow changes with deterministic integrity checks before deployment.
• Route traffic based on specific number context, not global defaults.
• Validate flows at multiple levels: static, smoke, stub, and real.
• Centralize user preferences in a single JSON-backed store.

Patterns

• Kill-switched rollout for high-risk logic changes

• Multi-level validation framework (L1-L4) with state tracking

• Context-aware routing with prior-call injection

• Surface-form matching with negator/hedge handling

How to apply

• Use grounding_gate_demo to log and review affirmation matches.

• Configure phone_server to select flows based on caller ID history.

• Run L2 stub tests to catch agent stalling before real traffic.

• Store user preferences in JsonMaintenanceRequestStore for consistent access.

Pitfalls

• Large branch scope (309 files) increases merge conflict risk.
• Complex string matching in the gate may miss edge cases.
• L2 Real testing revealed non-deterministic routing failures.
• Wiring gap between L2RealRunner and flow_quality_gate flags needs manual patching.