Sometimes Zero Bytes Is the Right Result
Sometimes Zero Bytes Is the Right Result A system that stops rather than guesses may be doing the most valuable work available to it. We judge automated systems by what they produce. That is not a foolish instinct. For most of the history of software it was a reasonable proxy: a program that returned nothing […]
Guardrails Aren’t Enough. Who Verifies the Guardrails?
Guardrails Aren’t Enough. Who Verifies the Guardrails? A control is an artefact. Artefacts need evidence too. Most of us respond to a bad outcome the same way. We write a rule. The rule is usually a good one. It names the thing that went wrong and forbids it. Some months later there is a document […]
A Clean Result Is Not the Same as a Clean System
A Clean Result Is Not the Same as a Clean System An audit can complete, report nothing, and have examined nothing. Imagine a report that comes back clean. Every stage of the process ran. Nothing errored. The summary says zero issues found. And underneath, the internal accounting reconciles perfectly: the number of items examined matches […]