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Duplicate Detection

When a tenant reports the same problem twice ("my shower was cold again"), you don't want to dispatch a second plumber. You want to reopen last week's work order and escalate.

PMFriend's duplicate detector runs on every NEW and TRIAGED request and raises a yellow banner in the request drawer if a likely duplicate exists.

How it finds them​

Two passes:

  1. Semantic (Claude): the incoming request text + candidate texts (last 14 days at the same property) go to Claude. Claude returns a confidence score + one-sentence reasoning. Example: "cold showers" and "no hot water again" get flagged as near-duplicates even though they share no keywords.
  2. Heuristic (Jaccard fallback): if Claude is unavailable, we tokenise both texts, strip stopwords, and compute Jaccard overlap. Anything ≥ 0.35 raises the banner.

What the banner looks like​

⚠ Likely duplicate of request #MR-2189 (94% confidence)
   "Shower ran cold on Saturday night" — submitted 8 days ago, status IN_PROGRESS.
   Reasoning: Both describe intermittent hot water; same bathroom context.
   [Open request] [Mark as duplicate] [Dismiss]

Mark as duplicate links the two requests (audit-logged) and closes the new one. Dismiss hides the banner for this session.

Scope​

  • Same property only — we never cross-match between properties.
  • 14-day window — older requests aren't candidates. Configurable per-agency (not exposed in UI yet).
  • Excludes COMPLETED + CANCELLED by default — we match against open work only.

API​

POST /api/v1/maintenance-requests/{id}/detect-duplicate

No body. Returns:

{
  "candidates": [
    {
      "requestId": "MR-2189",
      "confidence": 0.94,
      "reasoning": "Both describe intermittent hot water; same bathroom context.",
      "sourceText": "Shower ran cold on Saturday night"
    }
  ],
  "modelVersion": "claude-haiku-4-5@prompt-v1"
}

Empty candidates[] means no likely duplicates — banner doesn't show.

Why this matters commercially​

Duplicate dispatches are one of the most common owner complaints we've heard. "I paid $340 to have a plumber come out and they told me the same thing they told me last month" — owner churn risk. This feature turns that into a two-click "oh, this is the same issue, let me reopen the other WO" flow.

See also​