Cancelling worked but had no policy behind it: no window, no penalty, nothing
happened to the deposit, and the no_show status had no effect at all.
Two rules that are expensive to get wrong, and both are load-bearing:
- The clinic cancelling its own appointment is never charged. That check is the
first line of the calculation, not somewhere in the middle, so a later
refactor cannot reorder it into charging patients for the clinic's decision.
- A penalty never exceeds what was actually paid. Anything above that is a
debt, and debt belongs to billing, not to cancellation. An unpaid appointment
is charged nothing and the response says why.
The default is no penalty at all — a penalising default would have made every
patient with a near appointment liable the moment this deployed.
No-shows are rows, not a counter on the patient: a counter loses which
appointment and when, which makes the 12-month window impossible. Crossing the
threshold adds an existing TenantTag; it never blocks the patient, because
blocking is an eligibility policy (task 09) written on top of that same tag.
Waitlist notifies up to ten matching people and the first to book wins. An
exclusive queue reads fairer but means a freed slot sits locked for half an
hour while someone ignores their phone — so the SMS says so explicitly instead.
Insufficient wallet balance does not fail the cancellation: the slot is freed
either way. A slot should not be held hostage to money.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
