The human gate

One wrong number you cannot find poisons every number you cannot check. The gate is what stops that, and it is the condition under which the rest of the product is allowed to be useful.

Say you ask what a job cost. The software goes to your files. It finds a line. It brings the line back, word for word, with two things attached: which document it came from, and which lines on the page. That is a proposal. It is not yet in your record.

A person looks at it. They can see the line. They can open the document it came from and read the page around it. Then they do one of two things. Accept — it goes into the record with the source attached. Hold — it stays out, marked as held, until somebody deals with it.

There is no third path. There is no the software was fairly sure, so it went in.

And a thing with no source is not a proposal at all. If the software cannot point at the document and the lines, it does not propose — it says it cannot answer.

Think about what a number in a record is for. You will act on it — bill from it, budget from it, sign from it, argue from it. The question is never is this probably right. It is can I stand on this.

You can stand on a number when three things are true: you know where it came from, a person looked at that source and agreed, and nothing has changed it since. The gate gives you all three. The proposal carries its source or it is not a proposal. The acceptance is a person's act, not a setting. And the record holds accepted things only, so everything in it came through the same door.

People hear "a person has to accept each one" and picture a thousand yes buttons. That is not where the work is.

The slow part of records has always been the finding. Which box, which file, which page, which line. That is the part the software does, across tens of thousands of files, and then it shows you the page.

The accepting is a glance. The line is there, the source is beside it, you know your own business. That is less work than the finding, and far less than checking a number the software wrote into your books without asking. It also does not have to happen all at once — held things wait, and nothing is accepted on your behalf because you were busy.

It does not make the person right. If you accept a wrong line, a wrong line is in your record — with its source attached. The gate makes every entry traceable. It does not make every entry true. That is still you.

It does not check the sums. Those are done by separate code rather than by the model, and that code is tested against one of the founder's own old jobs — 376 metres at $834.95 a metre, reproduced exactly. But a right sum on a wrong quantity is a wrong answer, and the gate is where the quantity gets looked at.