What running a care home taught me about building software alerts

Before FounderFlow, I ran a care home for years. In that world, a false alarm isn't just annoying, staff stop trusting the call button, and eventually someone stops running when it goes off. That single lesson shaped FounderFlow more than anything from my software background.

When I started building an alerting system for founders juggling multiple businesses, my first instinct was the classic engineer move: flag everything that looks slightly off, let the human sort it out. Care home experience made me distrust that instantly. A system that cries wolf trains you to ignore it, right up until the one time it's real.

So instead of a flat list of alerts, everything gets graded: Verified, Very Likely, Needs Review, or Monitor Only. Monitor Only is the most important bucket, not because it's urgent, but because it protects the credibility of the other three. If I let low-confidence noise sit at the same visual weight as a confirmed problem, I'd be training myself to stop trusting the whole system within a month.

Curious if anyone else building alerting/monitoring tools has run into this "cry wolf" decay, and how you handled it.