Logan Cusano
6d5eb4c5f2
The 2026-08-16 correlation dump showed two failures that looked unrelated and were the same bug. TG 9048 held one incident of 28 calls spanning 49 minutes -- a prisoner transport, a drone retrieval, a records lookup and a canvass, glued together -- while 32 other calls on that same channel stayed permanently orphaned. Creating an incident required a concrete incident_type. Nothing on a transit police channel produced one: the extraction prompt said to prefer "other" when uncertain, extraction then collapsed "other" to None, and the tag-based fallback had no tags to work with because administrative traffic carries none. So the channel could never open a SECOND incident. Every later call funnelled into whichever incident happened to exist first, and every call too substantial for the thin path had nowhere to go at all. The two symptoms were the same missing value seen from opposite ends. Severity now decides incident-worthiness. It is a better fit for the question being asked -- "is this a real event?" -- than a service label ever was, and unlike incident_type it is always present. The prompt defines four levels with no escape hatch (routine/minor/moderate/major, "unknown" is gone) and calls skipped for a too-short transcript are still recorded as routine, because downstream code reads a missing severity as "not processed yet" rather than "nothing happened". Anything above routine, or carrying any extracted content, opens an incident under the neutral "other" type. "other" is also kept as a real classification now -- rail operations and public works genuinely are not police, fire or EMS. Separately, thin calls no longer refresh updated_at; they write last_thin_at. updated_at drives every recency gate in the fast path, so each "10-4" was resetting the idle clock on whatever it attached to, keeping that incident inside the gate for as long as anyone kept acknowledging. An incident now ages from its last substantive call. This is what made the 49-minute incident possible even once buckets existed, so it is fixed independently rather than being left to the gate change. The re-correlation sweep also now honours skip_reason. /upload has always refused to correlate garbage and too-short transcripts, but the sweep did not apply the same filter, so those fragments came back minutes later through the thin path and attached to whatever was most recent -- a second, quieter route into the same over-merge. Adds tests/test_correlator_gate.py (15 cases), the first tests against incident_correlator.py in its 1,517-line history. tests/conftest.py stubs firebase-admin only when it is genuinely absent, so the container's real SDK is never shadowed; this is what makes the correlator importable in the dev venv. That stub also made test_mqtt_handler and test_node_sweeper collectable for the first time, revealing 10 pre-existing failures in them -- test-vs-code drift, untouched here and catalogued in DEFERRED.md. No new environment variables, so CI deploys this without an ansible run.