Glossary
Consequential Action
Not every operation a system performs needs to be gated the same way. A consequential action is one whose effect is felt outside the requesting process: money moves, a production system changes, a policy or a key is altered, a message goes to someone who wasn't expecting it. These are the actions worth the cost of authorization, evidence, and — for the highest-stakes categories — human review.
Drawing this line explicitly matters because the alternative is usually one of two failure modes: gating everything equally, which makes routine operations slow and trains people to route around the friction, or gating nothing consistently, which leaves the decision of what counts as consequential to whoever happened to be building a given feature.