How Intello thinks

Read this once and you'll never need to look up our concepts again. The product has four moving parts — that's it.

The loop

Every integration runs the same loop on a schedule:

fetch the spec  →  compare to last time  →  classify what changed  →  alert the right people

We call those four steps sync, diff, classify, and route. They map onto the four words you'll see throughout the app and these docs.

1. Sync

A sync is one check. Intello fetches the API's OpenAPI document and stores a normalized copy. The first successful sync is your baseline — there's nothing to compare to yet.

Each subsequent sync produces a new snapshot, which Intello compares to the previous one. Cadence is configurable per integration; library integrations default to hourly.

2. Diff

Two snapshots in, Intello compares them structurally — not as text. Whitespace, key order, and description-only edits don't generate noise. What does generate a diff:

• Endpoints added, removed, or moved
• Request/response fields added, removed, retyped, or made required/optional
• Auth requirements tightened or loosened
• Status codes and error shapes changed

Each material difference becomes one change event, the unit of work the rest of the product is built around.

3. Classify

Every change event is tagged with a severity. Three tiers, no judgment calls left to you:

• Safe — additive. New optional field, new endpoint, new enum value. Existing code keeps working.
• Risky — could break code if you assumed the old shape. A field becoming required, a type narrowing, a stricter enum.
• Breaking — will break code that assumed the old shape. Field or endpoint removed, type changed incompatibly, auth tightened.

Your alert preferences route severities to channels independently, which is how you stop paging on green stuff.

4. Route

A change event hits your routing rules and lands in the channels you connected — Slack, Teams, email, PagerDuty, the in-app inbox. Per-integration overrides exist but you rarely need them.

One detail that surprises people: when one underlying schema change touches twelve endpoints, you get one alert, not twelve. Intello groups by root cause so you don't get spammed by something you've already triaged.

That's the whole thing

Sync, diff, classify, route. If you understand those four words you can read every other page in these docs without looking anything up.