The Governance Tax — Four Gates Between Your Trade-off and Your Next Production Incident
Every architectural compromise already has a position in the trade-off space. The question is whether that position was chosen or accumulated. Four gates stand between an undocumented compromise and the incident that exposes it: measure the frontier, verify hard constraints, price the meta-trade-offs, enforce the safety boundary. For most decisions, two gates and four ADR fields are enough. The full procedure exists for AI-navigated systems and cross-team migrations where the stakes justify the overhead. An undocumented operating point is not a neutral default — it is a debt that compounds until production calls it in.