03 Declaring the boundaries accepting good enough

03 · Declaring the boundaries, accepting good enough

A specification also declares its own scope: the general aim that frames it and the objectives, stated as atomic, verifiable elements. This is not formalism. A language model, left without explicit boundaries, tends to overdo — to add structure, cases, generalisations no one asked for, in the direction of what looks complete rather than what is needed. It is the machine's own version of a tendency project management has long known under the names gold plating (adding unrequested merits) and over-engineering: symptoms paid for in time, cost and complexity, which the management disciplines cite as a recurring cause of delays and of resources spent on features no one will use. The declared scope is the boundary against which this tendency is measured; it is also what makes it possible for the competent human operator to recognise the overdoing and correct it, because it provides the yardstick — was this in the scope? was this objective declared?

Alongside this boundary stands an explicit criterion: good enough. The good-enough discipline, formalised by Herbert Simon as satisficing, holds that under real constraints of time and information the rational choice is not the best in absolute terms but the first that clears a declared threshold of adequacy. In business management it is a recognised principle: releasing a "good enough" product allows entering the market sooner, and the pursuit of perfection is documented as a cause of missed opportunities. The method adopts this criterion as a design constraint: complexity is to be justified case by case, and "good enough" is a legitimate decision, not a compromise on the cheap.

One qualification applies, and it is also the method's point of flexibility: good-enough is not universally superior to optimisation — there are contexts, and the literature documents them, in which pushing toward the maximum pays. The method adopts it as a default because the failure mode it must correct is the excess, not the shortfall, of structure; but the behaviour remains configurable. Scope is where one declares where to set the bar: "good enough" stops the search at the first valid result; raising it on a critical dimension — asking not for an acceptable solution but for the best attainable on that axis — commits all the actors to a more demanding criterion, with the costs that follow. One can change the height of the threshold, not the fact that a threshold, under the constraint of time and resources, is always there. The method does not impose a particular criterion; it requires that the criterion, whatever it is, be declared and explicit.

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