Writing

Building reliable integrations

Webhooks lie, clocks disagree, and identity is a negotiation. Reliability is idempotency plus evidence.

2026-07-30notes

Integrations path
  1. External systemsCRM, Slack, APIs
  2. IngestionWebhooks & fetches
  3. ProcessingIdentity, idempotency
  4. PersistenceEvidence before interpretation
  5. AIContext in, claims out
  6. DownstreamActions with retry policy

Default assumptions that will hurt you

  • Exactly-once delivery.
  • Stable IDs across systems.
  • A meeting, a contact, and a Slack user being the same person on the first try.
  • That a 200 from your webhook handler means the downstream write succeeded.

What “reliable” means here

  • Persist the payload before you interpret it.
  • Process with a key you can retry safely.
  • Classify failures: auth, contract, downstream, poison message.
  • Make the human-visible action (CRM note, Slack message) a job with its own policy.

This is the unglamorous half of production AI. Skip it and the model will confidently narrate a world your CRM does not contain.