The three gates
If no rules apply, the gate passes — there is nothing to fail.
The arithmetic worth knowing
Under strict and balanced, any single failure rejects the item
Under strict and balanced, any single failure rejects the item
A score of 1 on any pass/fail or deterministic rule trips the floor. Deterministic rules are therefore hard gates under these two settings — which is usually what you want, since they only fail on things that are objectively wrong.
Under balanced, middling scores drag the ratio
Under balanced, middling scores drag the ratio
Custom-scored rules returning 2 or 3 do not trip the floor, but they do count against the 70% threshold.With only three rules, a single custom rule scoring 3 already means just 67% are at 4 or above — a reject. Few rules combined with custom scoring makes for a twitchy gate. Know the arithmetic before mixing them.
Under lenient, a hard failure can pass
Under lenient, a hard failure can pass
Scores of 5, 5 and 1 average 3.67, which is accepted despite the failure.Never use
lenient alongside brand-critical deterministic rules.Choosing one
balanced is the default and right for most configurations.
Move to strict when every rule is genuinely blocking. Use lenient only when the rules are advisory.
Calibrating to your economics
What happens to a rejected item decides the right strictness.In Speedtrain’s normal flow a rejection lands in a human review queue, which makes false rejections cheap and missed violations the expensive error. That argues for keeping deterministic rules strict and AI rules narrow.If rejection instead triggers costly retries, bias the other way.