How do you dedupe support tickets that don't share any words? Here's our messy attempt.

We build an internal helpdesk, and I want to talk through a problem we only partly solved — because I suspect a lot of you have hit it too, and I'd genuinely like to hear how you handled it. The most requested thing from our users was never "better ticket forms." It was "please make the duplicates stop." Here's the shape of it. A deploy goes slightly wrong at a 40-person company. Within ten minutes you have: a handful of chat messages : "login is broken", "can't get into dashboard???", "deploy looks weird" several error-tracker events (whatever you run — Sentry, Rollbar, an APM): TokenExpiredError ×2, a 401 spike on /api/auth , a 5xx spike on auth-svc a couple of emails to IT : "access token expired", "need login reset" Nine items across three channels. One root cause: token rotation broke in that deploy. Whoever's on rotation spends the morning proving that, instead of fixing anything. We wanted to automate the recognition step — "these are the same thing" — not the fixing step. This is the honest version: what we tried, the small thing we actually shipped, and the parts we haven't cracked. If you've built something similar, I'd love to be told what we got wrong. Attempt 1: rules and keywords (broke immediately) The obvious first cut: normalize ticket text, match on keywords and categories, merge on high overlap. It fails on the example above, and it fails structurally: "login is broken" and TokenExpiredError share zero tokens. The human on rotation isn't string-matching — they know a deploy just happened, they know what auth-svc does, they've seen this failure shape before. Rules encode none of that. Rule systems also rot. Every incident teaches you a new synonym for "it's down," and six months in you own a regex museum nobody wants to touch. Maybe you've kept one of these healthy long-term — if so I'd honestly like to know how. Attempt 2: embed everything, cluster by similarity (the one we didn't ship) The tempting next move: embed ticket text, cluster on cosine