Development record
2026-09-23 — Delivered work states the verification rung it was checked at, and a project whose blast radius reaches strangers declares that radius before it may lower the rung (product thinker, ruling on iss-2608290944122400). This answers the question rfc-3 names as the one it most needs answered, and rfc-3 records it; the RFC stays open on its other questions, so there is no ADR yet. The carriers are itd-173 and itd-176, both drafts.
decisiondcn-2609230000000008
2026-09-23 — Delivered work states the verification rung it was checked at, and a project whose blast radius reaches strangers declares that radius before it may lower the rung (product thinker, ruling on iss-2608290944122400). This answers the question rfc-3 names as the one it most needs answered, and rfc-3 records it; the RFC stays open on its other questions, so there is no ADR yet. The carriers are itd-173 and itd-176, both drafts.
Frontmatter
| id | dcn-2609230000000008 |
|---|---|
| type | decision |
| date | 2026-09-23 |
.abcd/work/decisions/dcn-2609230000000008-delivered-work-states-the-verification.md
open on GitHub ↗ · commit history ↗
mentions3
- iss-2608290944122400Efficiency pressure is the defeater this framework has no answer to, and it is the one that turns a voluntary verification ladder back into a rubber stamp. A practitioner framing of Elish's moral crumple zone names three conditions that hollow out a human in the loop: no transparency into what the automation did, no authority to change anything, and an organisation's drive for efficiency. Tested against this framework the first is partly answered and the second is answered well, since the product thinker sets the acceptance criteria, owns the register they are addressed in, chooses the verification rung, and configures the facilitator, which is real authority over the things that determine the outcome rather than a veto at the end. The third is unanswered. Climbing the verification ladder costs money, time, and subscriptions, and nothing in the design resists the pull towards the cheapest rung. For a solo builder the organisation exerting that pressure is the builder, which makes the pressure harder to notice rather than weaker. Worth deciding whether the framework should make the chosen rung visible in what it produces, so that shipping on the cheapest rung is a stated position rather than a silent default, and whether a project whose blast radius reaches strangers should have to say so out loud before the ladder can be lowered. Note also that the same framing arrives independently at the escalation ladder, calling it tiered routing where higher-stakes cases go to humans and lower-stakes ones to automation, which is convergent evidence for that design rather than a new idea.
- itd-173Verification escalates from the built-in check to an outside audit, and the product thinker picks the rung
- itd-176Whatever ships says how hard anyone looked at it