Delivery baseline
The delivery boundary is where learning becomes obligation.
The gate is not a return to Big Design Up Front. It is the moment a selected slice crosses from cheap uncertainty into accountable production engineering.
Build to Learn stays empirical
Build to Learn is iterative, working, disposable, and conversational. Its goal is not exhaustive specification. Its goal is to resolve economically consequential uncertainty before production work absorbs it.
That is the opposite of pretending that prose can eliminate uncertainty upfront. RDD uses working behavior to discover where intent is still unstable.
The baseline changes accountability
At some point, a team must stop treating every unresolved question as cheap exploration and begin engineering a production commitment. RDD calls that boundary the delivery baseline, with Freeze Gate as the named governance moment.
After the baseline, change can still happen. It is simply treated as change to an engineered commitment rather than unresolved discovery hiding inside production work.
The baseline is not a claim that reality stopped changing. It is a decision that enough reality is understood to engineer responsibly.
What the baseline should contain
A useful baseline records accepted behavior, rejected alternatives, known assumptions, unresolved risks, Reality Check results, scope boundaries, acceptance criteria, architecture concerns, data expectations, integration dependencies, and production readiness obligations.
That evidence gives product, architecture, QA, security, delivery, and commercial teams a shared reference for what is being commissioned.