Provision · Commission · Monitor ships as a linked strip, not as a diagram
Decided
The three-stage hardware workflow on /smart-tech is published as three numbered cards, each stating what enters and what leaves it, each linking to the section that carries that stage in full. It is not published as a connected diagram, and it is not wrapped in <figure>.
Affects: app/smart-tech/page.tsx (#workflow), lib/tech-architecture.ts (HARDWARE_WORKFLOW_STAGES), docs/architecture.mmd
What the alternative was. A rendered SVG or Mermaid chain with arrows between the boxes, matching the treatment docs/architecture.mmd gets. The homepage pillar card promises "Provision · Commission · Monitor", and a diagram is the obvious way to show a sequence.
Why it was rejected. A diagram of three boxes and two arrows carries one fact — that the stages are ordered — and the reader already knew that from the eyebrow. What the reader does not know, and what the claim actually rests on, is whether the output of one stage is genuinely the input to the next or whether three separate tools are being described in a row. That is the In/Out pair on each card, and it is text: "the same configuration that produced the cut list" is a sentence, not a shape.
The strip also does something a picture cannot. Each card is a link into the section below it, so the sequence doubles as a table of contents for a long page. A <figure> would be a dead end at the top of the scroll.
There is a maintenance argument too, and it is not the main one but it is real. docs/architecture.png is guarded by check:diagram, which re-renders the source and compares bytes, because a stale diagram is a lie that nothing else would catch. Every diagram added to this site adds one of those guards or adds an unguarded image. Three cards driven by an exported array need neither: the content is the data, and the page cannot disagree with itself.
What would make this wrong. A workflow with branches — a commissioning path that forks on protocol family, or a monitoring stage that only applies to the bidirectional vendors — is genuinely a graph, and prose describing a graph is worse than a drawing of one. At that point the strip should become a diagram with a render guard, not a longer strip.