Capturing rules from conversation

Watch a dispatcher work for a day and you notice something: most of the rules of the operation have never been written down. They surface in passing — "no, not him, daycare callouts have to be staffed before three" — applied flawlessly and recorded nowhere. When that dispatcher retires, the rule retires with them.

Vera 1.3 ships rule capture from conversation. When an operator states a policy in the middle of a task — not in the Rulebook, just in the flow of getting something resolved — Vera notices, and after the task completes, proposes it as a rulebook candidate: structured form, plain-English source, and a cross-check against the existing rulebook for overlaps and contradictions.

The cross-check matters more than the capture. Operational rules accrete over years, and verbal rules especially tend to be local variants of written ones. If a captured candidate overlaps an existing rule, Vera shows both and asks which should govern — or whether the new one is a refinement (scoped to a customer, a region, a season). Contradictions are surfaced before activation, because the one thing worse than an unwritten rule is two written rules that disagree.

And, as always: nothing activates without operator confirmation. The capture path produces candidates, never live rules. The confirmation gate is the same one used for authored and imported rules, and it is not negotiable, because the moment a rule can slip into the rulebook without a human signing it, the audit trail stops meaning anything.

The quiet effect we're seeing at our production customers: the rulebook is becoming the place where institutional knowledge goes to survive. A senior dispatcher's offhand remark is now a versioned, attributed, machine-enforced rule. Twenty years of experience, one confirmation click at a time.

Also in 1.3: imported rule files (CSV and plain text) go through the same parse-review-activate flow, and memory recall got measurably better at pulling the right precedents for rare disruption types. Details in the changelog.