clarification-gatelisted

# Clarification Gate Answers one question: which unknowns are worth a person's attention, and which are worth a recorded assumption. Both errors are costly. Guessing on a blocking unknown rebuilds a subsystem. Asking about every unknown makes the user do the analysis they hired the system to do. ## 1. The blocking test An unknown is blocking when at least one holds: 1. **Architecture depends on it.** The answer changes the data model, the boundaries, the deployment shape, or which external system is used. 2. **It is expensive to reverse.** Getting it wrong means a migration, a rewrite, or a change to already stored data. 3. **It carries legal, financial or safety consequence.** Money movement, who owns data, what may be deleted, who may see what. 4. **The readings are genuinely incompatible.** Not a detail with a sensible default, but two products wearing the same word. 5. **No defensible default exists.** Any choice is arbitrary and the source gives no direction. An unknown that fails all five is not blocking. It becomes an assumption with its cost written down, and the work continues. ## 2. Non blocking, by construction These almost never justify stopping. They have defaults, and the default is recorded rather than asked: wording of interface copy, pagination page size, sort order defaults, date display format, colour and spacing choices where a design system exists, maximum lengths of free text fields, whether a list shows ten or twenty items, namin