Convention Overhead vs Graph Quality

The ongoing trade-off between the cost of each added convention -- the authoring friction it imposes on contributors, the cognitive load it adds to readers, the machinery it introduces that must be maintained -- and the quality improvement the convention is meant to produce -- the legibility it adds, the drift it prevents, the navigability it preserves. Each convention the project considers sits somewhere on this trade-off; the project's practice of deciding when to add, revise, or retire a convention is the working-out of this tension case by case.

The phrase captures a tension the project holds open rather than collapses. Every new Contract, Decision, or predicate raises the bar for contribution; every absence of structure admits more drift. No general rule resolves the trade-off; the judgment is made per-case, weighing the specific convention's overhead against the specific quality gain it is expected to produce. Contracts and other structural nodes carry contends_with::[[Convention Overhead vs Graph Quality]] edges when their existence visibly navigates this trade-off -- the edge declares the tension as acknowledged rather than ignored.

The project does not treat one side of the trade-off as paramount. The scion publication model depends on the repository's surface staying small enough to understand; the practice's durability depends on the conventions being strong enough to survive drift. Both pressures are real. The trade-off is where the project does its architectural thinking -- every Contract with a contends_with:: edge to this concept is a node whose author considered the cost alongside the benefit and decided the benefit carried the day, with the contends_with:: edge acknowledging that a future reader may weigh the same trade-off differently.

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