Three months after starting a project with PDLC, a team member asked a simple question: "What does the system look like right now?"
There was no good answer. /pdlc-arch had been run six times. The docs/02_design/architecture/ directory had six timestamped files: 20260112-arch-analysis.md, 20260204-arch-analysis.md, and so on. Each captured the architecture at a point in time. None answered the question as asked — because the question was about current state, not history.
The same thing happened with coding standards. The team ran /pdlc-standard (in the old form) to update the naming conventions. Instead of editing the existing file, it created coding-style-v2.md. Then coding-style-v3.md. By the time someone new joined the project, there were four files covering the same topic, with no obvious canonical one.
These weren't edge cases. They were a systematic confusion about what kind of artifact you're writing.
The design choice: ledger vs surface
