Idempotency
The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under decisions and evidence.
What the system returns, what it refuses to return, and what a decision can be redeemed for afterwards.
every figure, with its population →What idempotency means
An operation is idempotent when doing it twice leaves the same result as doing it once. It matters because networks fail after the server has acted and before the client has heard. Without idempotency the client's only options are to retry and risk a duplicate, or not to retry and risk losing the result. With it, the retry returns the original outcome.
The mechanism is a client-supplied key held server-side against the response, plus a hash of the request content so that a key reused with different content is refused rather than silently returning the wrong answer. In entity resolution the stakes are higher than in most APIs, because a duplicated resolve can mint a duplicate entity — the exact fragmentation the system exists to prevent.
Idempotency is not caching. A cache is keyed by time and expires; idempotency is keyed by identity of the request and is about not doing something twice. The two are often implemented together and should be reasoned about separately.
Entity Bind accepts an idempotency key on resolution and batch submission, binds it to a hash covering the record content, and returns an explicit conflict when the same key arrives with different content rather than serving a mismatched cached response. Retries are limited to idempotent operations at the HTTP client layer, with bounded backoff.
Where this shows up in Entity Bind
Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.
- The API referenceThe REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field.Open
- The MCP serverEleven tools over the Model Context Protocol, on the same credentials, tenancy, rate limits and credit rule as the HTTP API.Open
- Pricing and the credit ruleWhat a decision costs, what a deep attempt costs, and the three things that cost nothing at all.Open
The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.
Start freeThe terms next to this one
Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.
Replay
Replay is re-serving a previous decision for byte-identical content rather than recomputing it, which makes repeated submissions free and deterministic — provided the replayed decision is still one the system would stand behind.
Content fingerprint
A content fingerprint is a hash of the meaningful content of a submitted record, used to recognise that the same thing has been sent before regardless of when, in what order, or under what key.
Decision receipt
A decision receipt is the durable, retrievable record of why a particular match was made — the features, the probability, the thresholds in force, the sources cited and the version of the pipeline that decided — addressable by an identifier returned with the answer.
Tool call
A tool call is a single invocation of an exposed operation by a model or agent, with structured arguments and a structured result — the unit that is authenticated, metered and audited.
Fragmentation
Fragmentation is the opposite failure to over-merging: one real entity split across several clusters, so the same company is counted, contracted with or invoiced more than once.
- IntegrationPythonNo package on the index and no generated SDK. The API is plain JSON over HTTPS with a bearer token, and thirty lines are what a wrapper would hold.
- IntegrationSnowflakeAn integration pattern over the HTTP API rather than a connector. Unload the rows, post them in requests of up to 500, and load the results back.
The other 8 terms on this shelf
What the system returns, what it refuses to return, and what a decision can be redeemed for afterwards.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
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