Stop, Continue, or Escalate

State is a claim about what the system can justify.

OPEN means an incident exists but diagnostic work has not started. INVESTIGATING means observations or decisions are being collected. SUPPORTED means a candidate has sufficiently specific support under the declared policy. VERIFIED means the mechanism gate passed and every declared impact scope is explained. UNRESOLVED records the evidence gap; ESCALATED records a handoff to a named operator.

Support can be withdrawn when contradictory evidence arrives. A verified mechanism for EU quotes does not close an incident that also includes unexplained APAC prices. Keep per-hypothesis status separate from incident status. In the engine, an individual mechanism may pass while the incident remains SUPPORTED until coverage is complete.

Define closure before seeing the answer.

The verification policy checks provenance, freshness, mechanism evidence, controlled contrast, and scope coverage. A model confidence score is not one of those predicates. If the gate fails, report the failing requirements. A manual “verify” request evaluates the gate and leaves the investigation open when the evidence is insufficient.

Budgets control continuation. Stop requesting more evidence when the permitted next check would exceed time, tool calls, or cost. Evaluate existing evidence first; a gate already satisfied can still close the diagnostic workflow. Otherwise preserve the best-supported account and escalate. Exhaustion must not convert support into verification.

Abstention needs an operational next step.

An unresolved report should identify what is supported, what remains unexplained, which evidence was unavailable, who owns the next action, and which diagnostic request could close the gap. “The model is uncertain” gives an operator very little to work with. “The cache replay lacks the affected time window; the quote-platform owner must provide snapshot key-v12 and request pair q-17/q-18” is a practical handoff.

A system can escalate early when permitted checks cannot resolve a material gap. During severe impact, the commander may prioritize containment while diagnosis remains incomplete. These decisions belong to the response workflow; investigation evidence should inform them without silently granting the model mitigation authority.

Another check should have a reason to exist.

Marginal value is the expected improvement from one more observation given the current state. It declines when remaining checks are redundant or cannot change any relevant decision. A cheap check may still be worthwhile if it challenges the leading mechanism, while repeated supportive samples may add little. Use explicit continuation criteria, and record why a run stops even when its final answer sounds convincing.