Patterns
Consequence-proportional disclosure
Enough information for the judgment, not a bigger card.
How much the interface shows is decided by the consequence of the action, not by how much data exists. Small, reversible, delegated work gets no ceremony. A change that affects future runs of every sync gets its full preview, however few fields it touches.
What a consequential change must show
- Affected objects and targets
- Preserved objects and values
- Scope of change, including future runs
- Reversibility, and what reversing does not undo
- External notifications
- The alternatives that were considered
- How the result will be verified
Risk is a vector
Money, privacy exposure, blast radius, reversibility, downstream propagation, detectability, recovery cost, time sensitivity, evidence gap, authority ambiguity. A one-field mapping change is low in blast radius and high in propagation. Judge by the vector; never by the field count, and never let a total cancel a hard prohibition.
Preserved: ERP qty 5,400 · Excel read only · orders unchanged
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