The front door shrinks to seven exact tokens

On 2026-07-31 counsel asked "is the Sugar Pipes hearing tomorrow?" and got a menu whose line 2 read M-013 — Rahul Rathode vs Sugar Pipes Industries delhi. The deterministic front door rejected the sentence containing its own answer: three English messages, three identical menus, zero agent runs. D17's rule is now the code: code decides what may be SEEN, the model decides what was MEANT.

TODAY:      unmatched input  ->  menu
SHOULD BE:  unmatched input  ->  Vani

The deterministic surface, after

Seven tokens, each matched against the whole message (fullmatch), bare word only, no synonyms, no phrases. A leading slash is optional on 1–5 (WhatsApp's / autocomplete).

status is not a token (founder ruling, 2026-07-31): account questions are sentences for Vani and the brain-side account_status tool. The bare word routes to her like any other text.

Two defects retired, not preserved

• parse_matter_code used .search() — a code anywhere hijacked the sentence ("is m16 done?" became a scope command). Now: drop every non-alphanumeric, uppercase, require exactly M+digits as the whole message. M-013, m13, m 0013, and the en-dash spelling are one token; M13 please and is m16 done? reach Vani. Normalising is not fuzzy matching: one input, one canonical output.
• _name_matches fuzzy substring with a 3-char floor — the 2019 pattern D17 bans — is deleted, along with the switch phrases, the natural-language scope query, and the list-request phrase doors.

The U8/U9 hinge: menu state gets its own column

Token 7 turns on state: a bare number answers a menu only when a menu was just shown. Before this change the marker overloaded last_matter_id = NULL on the sticky row — so showing a menu destroyed the sticky scope, and a firm menu had no marker at all (any number from a multi-firm counsel picked a firm, menu or not). Migration 0235 adds business.channel_sticky_context.pending_menu_kind ('firm'/'matter'): menu state is now orthogonal to the sticky scope. A launched turn clears the markers — which is exactly the UAT pair that differs only in what preceded it:

How a matter-less turn reaches Vani

1. decide_channel_turn resolves firm_scope — firm pinned, matter_id=None (one live binding, no sticky, not single-matter).
2. The webhook envelope carries resolved_scope.matter_id = None.
3. The ingress consumer skips the chat-session resolver and launches a converse AgentCommand with no matter and no session (the AgentCommand matrix admits both-None converse launches; agents.agent_run already admits them: NULL scope + run_origin='user', migration 0216).
4. The clerk stamps a well-formed matter-less MiraConverseInput (NULL matter, empty frame) — the payload 3189's brain accepts.

A multi-firm counsel with no sticky still gets the firm menu: the one cardinality question code still owns, because a run cannot launch without a firm. Menus stay RLS-scoped; an inaccessible matter is never offered (CC-11, BDD-proven).

What was verified

• The D17 UAT list as unit tests: U1–U10 automatable cases live in tests/unit/test_channel_disambiguation_decision.py — including the byte-identical m-99 probe refusal (U10) and the U8/U9 pair.
• CC-04/05/11/26/31 BDD scenarios re-wired to the token semantics and green against real Postgres with RLS bound (proves migration 0235 + the reader end-to-end).
• Command-table proofs: aliases (disconnect, sign out) classify to logout; status classifies to nothing; stop's two halves (U13 unbind; honest in-flight reply, no fake halt, no unasked unbind).
• Launch-chain proofs: matter-less AgentCommand validation (both-None converse; either-alone rejected), consumer launches without a chat session, clerk stamps the matter-less input shape.
• make test, the clean-DB Alembic round-trip (make test-db-alembic-roundtrip, including alembic check), scoped Ruff, and scoped mypy (zero new errors vs main).

Open question flagged for the PR

Whether Meta enforces STOP as a platform-level opt-out on WhatsApp is UNCONFIRMED — the two-way form (halt in flight, unbind when idle) is safe under either answer, which is why it was chosen. The channel-side cancel path (a real halt) does not exist yet and is its own Story (pramaan-spec#3200); until then the in-flight reply says it cannot stop mid-answer and never claims a halt that did not halt.

The review round — four findings, one theme

Review found four places where state claimed something happened when it had not — D17's own theme. All four are fixed in this PR; a fifth (removing the disconnect alias) was rejected: an alias is another exact token, not a compatibility path, and the founder ruled aliases are free.

• The in-flight stop check missed reserved launches. reserve_launch_run_id writes only an agents.agent_run_key; the run row appears at claim. The check is now keyed on the reservation, so stop in that window answers honestly instead of unbinding (the race the two-way rule exists to cover).
• Markers survived intervening replies. A fully-sent static reply — scope answer, probe refusal, keyword text — now closes the menu; a bare number answers only a menu that was JUST shown (U8).
• The firm menu advertised name selection it no longer honours. It now says "Reply with a number", and overflow directs to the matter code (token 6 pins firm AND matter) instead of the firm name.
• Markers armed before delivery. Menu state now persists only after every chunk of the reply crossed — a menu counsel never saw never arms, and a failed intervening reply leaves the menu armed (they still last saw it). dispatch_decision_reply owns the post-delivery persist; resolved turns persist at launch.