In Software Execution Is Decision Making

The decision/execution boundary that directive governance depends on does not exist in software. In manufacturing, the design decision was already made and execution follows a spec. In software, everything you build is new. If it were not new, you would call the API that already does it. Every act of writing code is a design decision: choosing an abstraction, designing an interface, decomposing a system. No spec can fully predetermine these choices because essential complexity (Brooks) cannot be fully specified.

Software decisions also compound. Every abstraction choice constrains every future choice built on top of it. A software decision lives on in the codebase and shapes all future work. The center cannot centralize what is embedded in the act of writing code.