Decision-model placements

Six useful starting points

Start from the decision, not a vendor. Each placement names the bounded judgment, the exact envelope around it, and the evidence needed to keep or reject the design. Detailed methods live in the skill references.

Route

Choose among known paths

Use when

A request or case must be assigned to one of a bounded set of handlers.

Placement

Use a Choice-style judgment over candidates the application already knows.

Keep exact

Candidate eligibility, permissions, dispatch, and side effects remain in policy and code.

Validate

Measure wrong routes, no-match coverage, abstentions, total latency, and downstream outcomes.

Triage

Prioritize a review queue

Use when

People can inspect only part of an inbox, incident stream, or change set.

Placement

Estimate a named review priority or risk proposition for each item.

Keep exact

Mandatory reviews, legal holds, ownership, deadlines, and final decisions stay explicit.

Validate

Track missed important items, review load, time saved, and outcomes at the chosen operating point.

Retrieve

Keep the evidence that matters

Use when

A larger exact corpus must be narrowed before expensive analysis or writing.

Placement

Judge relevance over retrieved candidates; preserve source pointers and verbatim evidence.

Keep exact

Access control, always-keep records, citations, ordering constraints, and recovery paths remain deterministic.

Validate

Measure recall of necessary evidence, unsupported conclusions, cost, and end-to-end task quality.

Mixed architecture

Judge first, write only when needed

Use when

A workflow contains both a bounded decision and open-ended explanation or drafting.

Placement

A decision model selects, scores, or routes; a generator or person writes the remaining prose.

Keep exact

Control flow, schemas, permissions, state transitions, and execution checks stay outside both models.

Validate

Compare the complete workflow with the existing generator-only or human baseline.

Human decision support

Make tradeoffs visible

Use when

A person or team must combine several uncertain criteria without hiding value judgments.

Placement

Use bounded judgments as named inputs to an explicit utility, cost, or multi-criteria policy.

Keep exact

Weights, constraints, authority, appeals, and the final accountable decision remain human-owned.

Validate

Test sensitivity to evidence and weights, disagreement handling, reversibility, and realized outcomes.

Proof and safety

Prioritize checks; never replace them

Use when

Formal analysis, simulation, or runtime monitoring produces more cases than people can inspect.

Placement

Judgment may rank proof obligations, counterexamples, traces, or suspicious states for attention.

Keep exact

The prover, model checker, simulator, interlock, and authorization policy retain their own semantics.

Validate

Measure missed failures and review efficiency; never count a model score as discharged proof.