Plan Introspection and Guardrails

Knowing What an Optic Run Would Do, Before It Does It

The Friday-Afternoon Call

It's quarter to five. The on-call channel pings: "What did that endpoint actually do? It just hammered the user service with twelve thousand ids in one call and the SREs are unhappy." You look at the code. It's an optic traversal. It batched, just as designed. The optic did exactly what you asked it to do. The problem is that nobody asked beforehand whether that was a sensible thing to ask.

That is what this chapter is about. Three things you want, once an optic run has any chance of producing a sizeable batch.

Two small primitives, one familiar railway pattern, no surprises.

"What Would Round 1 Be?"

A Fetch program is a value. It hasn't run yet. You can pull its first round's pending-key set out without touching a backend, which is what Plans.preflight does:

Top half: the real run, the one that bills your cloud account. Bottom half: the inspection, the one you can put inside an assertThat. Same keysets. Different boundary.

Plan<UserId> plan = Plans.preflight(program);
plan.rounds();           // how many rounds it observed
plan.fetchedBatches();   // each round's keyset, in order
plan.totalKeyCount();    // sum across observed rounds
plan.truncated();        // could the walk see all rounds?

The walk uses stub null values where the real run would have real ones. Two outcomes:

• The combine logic survives the null ("foo" + null is "foonull", ArrayList::add(null) is fine). The walk reaches Done; truncated is false; the plan is complete.
• Something rejects the null (List.of(first), an Objects.equals on a primitive, a flatMap that actually reads the value). The walk halts where it stood; truncated is true. Round 1 is still accurate, and that's the dispatch you care about for an audit log or a budget guard.

"Stop Me If I'm About To Do Something Stupid."

The other half of the chapter doesn't ask offline; it asks at the round boundary, during the real run, just before each dispatch. That's a Guard:

// Refuse a round that would dispatch more than 500 keys.
Guard<UserId> ceiling = Guards.maxKeysPerRound(500);

// Cap rounds (kill runaway flatMap chains).
Guard<UserId> bounded = Guards.maxRounds(8);

// Cap backend calls across the whole run.
Guard<UserId> calls = Guards.maxBackendCalls(4);

// Log every dispatched round.
Guard<UserId> audit = Guards.audit((keys, round) ->
    log.info("optic dispatch round={} keys={}", round, keys.size()));

// Compose: audit everything, but refuse the oversized.
Guard<UserId> composed = audit.and(ceiling);

Fetch.RunResult<UserId, Team> result =
    Guards.runCached(program, backend::loadAll, composed);

A guard inspects, then either passes (the runner dispatches) or throws GuardViolationException. A refusal aborts the run before the resolver runs: the dispatch never leaves the JVM, the SREs stay happy, and the exception carries the offending round index and keyset so the rejection is loggable.

Guards.runCached and Guards.runAsync are drop-in replacements for the substrate runners with the guard threaded in.

Refusal as a Value

For callers that compose with Either, the railway wrappers move guard refusal onto the value channel:

Either<Throwable, Fetch.RunResult<UserId, Team>> outcome =
    SafeFetch.runCachedWithGuard(program, backend::loadAll, composed);

return outcome.fold(
    failure -> badRequest(failure.getMessage()),
    success -> ok(success.value()));

Either.left carries the GuardViolationException (or any other failure the run produced). Either.right carries the RunResult. The run never throws; the safe-async future never completes exceptionally. Same shape every controller already knows.

Quick Reference

Limits, Stated Up Front

• Round 1 only is universally observable offline. Past round 1, Plans.preflight walks programs whose combines accept null; the rest truncate. Plan.truncated() is the honest signal.
• Guards do not retry. A refused round aborts the run; it does not "wait and try a smaller batch". Compose with BatchLoaders.chunked upstream of the guard if you want size capping with continuation.
• maxBackendCalls counts non-empty rounds only. A round whose keys are all already cached costs no backend call and does not consume a budget slot.

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