Northwood's catalog had accreted for years: discontinued lines still listed, seasonal SKUs never wound down, margin rules living in a Notion doc that drifted from reality. Cleaning it by hand was a quarter of work no one could spare.

They didn't want an agent guessing at it blind, either. They wanted to see what it would do first.

For fourteen days the Catalog Specialist proposed and logged every lifecycle move — archive, throttle, reprice, draft — and wrote nothing. The team read the rows daily, tuned ALLOWED_TRANSITIONS where the agent surfaced a rule that was too strict, and built confidence one review at a time.

When they flipped to live, the rows looked exactly like the dry-run rows had. The first week archived 1,200 dead SKUs that had been quietly dragging the catalog down.

The lasting change is that margin policy is now enforced in the type system at decision time, stamped on each row as a cost-confidence tier. The Notion doc is gone. What the agent is allowed to do is encoded where it can't drift.