Fable
The gatekeeper decides which craftsman should take this piece of iron
After the expert workshop in Iron Bridge City was built, the busiest person was not the master, but the gatekeeper. Every piece of iron entering the door had to be judged by him: send it to the swordsmith, locksmith, clockmaker, or axle maker.
At first the gatekeeper was lazy and sent every iron piece to the most famous old master. The old master was skilled, but was quickly drowned in small jobs; fine clock parts queued behind cart axles, and urgently needed lock cores waited until dusk without being touched.
The city lord first hired several more famous craftsmen, but it was still chaotic. The problem was not the number of masters but that the intake did not distinguish the type, difficulty, and priority of work. Ordinary knife backs, precision gears, and broken axles were shoved into the same queue.
The old gatekeeper began recording the shape, cracks, purpose and time limit of each iron tool. He did not repair them himself, but decided which door they went through: rough work to the quick hands, fine work to the clockmaker, dangerous items first to the iron inspector, and only uncertain ones to the master craftsman.
During the first trial, some complained that the gatehouse blocked the way. But if a batch of axles is given to a swordsmith, they will be repaired beautifully but won't withstand pressure; if a clock gear is given to a rough craftsman, it will save time but ruin the whole clock. Assigning correctly matters more than having every master look at everything once.
Later, as workshop throughput increased greatly, the famous craftsmen instead had more time to handle difficult cases. The city lord understood that the key to an expert system is often at the entrance: first judge what category the problem belongs to, then send it to the right person, so that every request does not consume all the craft.
The gatekeeper later learned too. Each time something was misdelivered, he recorded the features in the gate ledger: cracks that looked like knife wounds but came from axle pressure, bright surfaces that looked decorative but were required to bear load. The thicker the ledger, the more accurate the dispatch.
The city lord did not turn the gatekeeper into a fifth master craftsman. The gatekeeper's job was to identify and route, not to personally solve every problem. A good entrance lets experts make fewer pointless judgments and saves their time for the requests that truly need their craft. Later, when new materials arrived in the city, the gatekeeper did not guess blindly; he first set up temporary routing, recorded the results, and then gradually fixed the rules. The better the entrance learns, the less likely the whole workshop is to be overwhelmed by new problems. The more accurate the entrance's judgment, the more the experts behind it can deliver real value. If the gate is chaotic, no number of master craftsmen will survive being drained by wrong requests. Routing itself is capacity. Later he also regularly reviewed misrouted cases. Therefore the gatekeeper's records were also treated as workshop assets.