Part 7 Flashcards

Three terms to carry out of this Part: decision aid, complexity budget, and premature governance. Cover the right-hand column, say each definition back to yourself from memory, and flag any term where the only thing that comes to mind is the Fernbank or Verge example rather than the underlying idea.

Term	Definition
Decision aid	A fast, recognizable-pattern sort applied before any deeper checklist runs — meant to catch the obvious skip-it cases quickly, so a slower, more thorough pass only gets spent on the situations that actually need it.
Complexity budget	How much structure — schema fields, governance edges, extra loops — the evidence currently on hand actually justifies, tracked as an ongoing account rather than a one-time design choice, with every added edge drawing against it whether or not it ever catches anything.
Premature governance	Wiring in a counter-metric, an audit loop, an arbitration edge, or a frozen node before the specific failure it exists to catch has actually happened even once — the fix may be the right one eventually, but nothing yet has shown it belongs on this loop, on this day.