📖What it means
The route a conversation turn takes when the shared path cannot run it: the agent's own routing answers the turn directly. It is a FALLBACK — it exists so a user channel never falls silent — and it does less: it composes its own prompt and does not get everything the shared path provides. Every use is logged, because a fallback that could pass for normal operation stops being a fallback and becomes the architecture by accident.
📖Easily confused with
[{"term": "lane", "distinction": "NOT A LANE. 'Lane' is about BUILD work \u2014 the route an initiative travels to be executed (planner, Orion bypass, Albus bypass) and therefore the route accountability travels. A path is about a single CONVERSATION TURN and carries no initiative, no mode and no escalation ladder. The two were confused for months because the code calls this 'Carol's lane', and the confusion is why the estate had four informal names for one thing. Not a DEGRADED or BROKEN turn: the direct path answers correctly, it simply answers with less. Not an OUTAGE: the channel is up."}]
📖Nuance
A fallback must be VISIBLE (see Fallback). This one is logged per turn, which is how it was caught — but nothing ALERTED on it, so Carol served every turn from here for hours and the only symptom Ninad could see was that her answers read worse. Running permanently on the direct path is a fault to be raised, not a steady state.
📖Also called
- fallback path
- direct lane
- own routing
📖Filed under
Category: work.
Source: Data Dictionary · Public information reflected here.