When PSL & MSD Is Overkill
A clarification, not a retreat
PSL & MSD were introduced as a way to govern long-running, AI-assisted projects without losing intent, correctness, or architectural integrity.
That does not mean they should be used everywhere.
In fact, applying PSL & MSD in the wrong context is worse than not using them at all. This article exists to define those boundaries clearly — not to weaken the method, but to prevent misuse.
What PSL & MSD optimize for
Before discussing overkill, it is important to restate the objective function.
PSL & MSD optimize for:
- long-term semantic stability
- explicit recoverability from mistakes
- resistance to AI-driven reinterpretation
- auditability of decisions over time
They do not optimize for speed, novelty, or exploration.
If those are your primary goals, you are solving a different problem.
Early ideation and exploration
PSL & MSD are a poor fit for:
- brainstorming
- architectural exploration
- “what if” prototyping
- discovery-driven work
In these phases, ambiguity is not a bug — it is the point.
Locking invariants too early increases the cost of learning and encourages premature certainty. PSL & MSD deliberately resist fluid reinterpretation, which is exactly what early exploration often requires.
Use sketches, notes, throwaway code, or even unstructured AI conversations instead.
Short-lived or disposable projects
If a project is expected to:
- live for days, not months
- be rewritten rather than evolved
- be abandoned without regret
…then PSL & MSD introduce unnecessary friction.
The ceremony only pays off when:
- the cost of restarting is high, or
- the cost of being wrong compounds over time.
Disposable work should remain disposable.
Low-stakes domains
PSL & MSD assume that mistakes matter.
If incorrect behavior:
- is cheap to detect,
- cheap to fix,
- and has no downstream consequences,
then governance-first approaches are misaligned.
Examples include:
- UI-only experiments
- internal tooling with no external contract
- personal scripts with no reuse expectations
In these cases, speed and convenience dominate correctness.
Multi-author teams without governance agreement
PSL & MSD implicitly assume:
- a single authority, or
- a clearly defined governance model.
Without that, immutability becomes contested rather than stabilizing.
In team environments, additional mechanisms are required:
- ownership rules
- arbitration procedures
- merge and versioning policy
Without them, PSL & MSD can become a source of friction rather than clarity.
This is not a flaw — it is an undeclared dependency.
When restarting is cheaper than correcting
Some projects are better reset than repaired.
If:
- errors are easy to detect,
- history is not valuable,
- and clean restarts are culturally acceptable,
then append-only ledgers and immutable specifications are unnecessary.
PSL & MSD exist specifically to make correction safer than restart.
If restart is already cheap, their advantage disappears.
The common misunderstanding
A frequent misreading is to treat PSL & MSD as “heavy documentation”.
They are not.
They are governance mechanisms designed to constrain evolution intentionally. When those constraints are unnecessary, they feel obstructive — correctly so.
Overkill is not a moral failing.
It is a signal of misaligned optimization.
The intended boundary
Use PSL & MSD when:
- the project will outlive individual work sessions
- AI is used repeatedly, not once
- correctness is cumulative
- you expect to discover that earlier decisions were wrong
Avoid them when:
- exploration matters more than preservation
- restarting is cheaper than fixing
- ambiguity is still productive
Closing note
Every serious method is overkill somewhere.
PSL & MSD are no exception — and that is a feature, not a weakness.
They exist for projects where stability is more valuable than speed, and memory is more valuable than momentum.
Outside that boundary, simpler tools win — and should.