The Mirror You Trained
Hand someone a typed model in swamp and ask them to define what data they want to capture. Watch what happens. The schema requires them to name the fields, specify the types, declare what constitutes a valid observation. Most people stall. Not because the tooling is hard. Because they have never been asked to articulate what they actually want to know with that level of precision. The same pattern repeats at every layer. Ask them to write a workflow DAG and they cannot specify which steps depend on which, because they have never separated their assumptions about sequence from actual causal dependencies. A CEL query against versioned data exposes the same gap from a different angle: you must know the question before you can ask it, and most people have never distinguished “what do I want to know” from “what does the system happen to show me.” ...