Undecided Commitment
A dependency incurred through a choice made for local reasons, which binds for years without ever having been treated as a commitment.
Reviewed July 16, 2026Stable
When not to use it
- Where the commitment was explicitly evaluated and accepted, which makes it an ordinary trade rather than an unnoticed one.
- Where reversal is cheap, in which case the duration is irrelevant.
- As an argument against making choices, since every technical decision creates some dependency and the question is whether it was priced.
Reach for something else instead
- Recorded reversal cost — an estimate written at the moment of choice, which converts an invisible commitment into a revisitable one.
- Periodic portability testing — one production workflow, one alternative, no re-tuning, measure the drop.
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Read more on the blog
- The lock-in is the prompts, not the APISwitching costs used to require board approval to incur. AI switching costs accumulate through ordinary engineering decisions nobody escalates, and the asset that creates them is the same one that produces the performance.
- The binding constraint is a transformer, not a chipCapital is available and chips are shipping. The thing stopping data centres from opening is a waiting list held by utilities, and a piece of equipment on a five-year lead time.
- One bug revoked every photo those cameras signedProvenance is the serious answer to synthetic media, it is now an ISO standard shipping in consumer hardware, and the gap between signing and verifying is wider than the adoption figures suggest.
Further reading
- International Energy Agency (2025), Energy and AI — infrastructure timelines against which siting and generation decisions are made.
- Dataiku with Harris Poll (2026), survey of 600 enterprise CIOs — 81% expecting multiple providers and 93% reporting task-specific model performance, against dependencies formed at prototype stage.
Primary sources, listed so you can check the claims on this page rather than take them on trust.
Where people go wrong
- Pricing acquisition and calling it a decision, when the reversal cost is the part that binds.
- Assuming an abstraction layer removes the dependency, when it usually addresses the cheapest layer of it.
- Treating the absence of an approval as evidence that nothing was committed.
At a glance
FieldFoundations
Signaturedecided at a level with no authority to commit, binding beyond the decider's horizon
Governance gaptriggers on magnitude, not duration
Correctiveprice reversal, not acquisition
Testone untuned portability trial
DifficultyIntermediate
Where this sits
A starting point. Nothing needs to come before it.
0Levelstarting point
0Needs firstnothing
0Opens upnothing further
1Areastays here
Computed from the prerequisite graph, not assigned. How this works