call-rehearsal

Call Rehearsal

A CALL-E call returns a structured result, and something downstream acts on it. The dangerous failure is not a call that fails loudly. It is a call that never reached a consenting human whose result still resolves to the branch that ships the order.

That happens because an unestablished field is absent, and absent is falsy. A rule as ordinary as confirmed != false is true when voicemail picked up and nothing at all was extracted.

This skill covers finding that before the call, by rehearsing the plan against the ways calls actually end.

When to use it

Use it before the first real call of any workflow whose result triggers a real-world side effect: dispatching, shipping, charging, cancelling, granting access, or writing a confirmation into a system of record. Use it again whenever the task, the result_schema, or the rule that reads the result changes, since this failure is introduced by editing any one of the three without the others.

Skip it for a call whose result nobody acts on automatically. A call that only produces a note for a human to read has no branch to get wrong.

The procedure

1. Name the single decision. Write down the one thing the call exists to establish. If there seem to be several, the call is doing too much and the rehearsal will show the decision field carrying weight it cannot hold.
2. Write the call plan. One JSON file with the task, the result_schema, the fields roles, and the decision_rule including what each branch does and whether it changes the real world.
3. Declare the field roles. Map result fields onto decision, reachability, consent, identity and deferral. Only decision is required. Do not guess a role: if you cannot say which field carries the decision, ask the person who owns the workflow.
4. Rehearse. Run the plan and read what the automation does for each ending.
5. Gate on the exit code. 0 means no ending above the threshold reaches a side effect, 20 means the plan should not go out as written, 30 means the plan could not be read.