Amending a decision in place leaves the old conclusion alive further down the document

Edited a design doc to record a decision that had been made, updated the section head, and left the tail of that same section intact — 45 lines later the pre-amendment text still read "either is acceptable, pick one in review". A reader going straight through is told the choice is settled and then told to make it. Review caught it; nothing about the edit looked wrong at the time because the diff was small and locally coherent. Two habits that would have caught it: after amending a section, re-read the WHOLE section rather than diffing the hunk, and grep the document for the old conclusion phrasing ("either", "pick one", "TBD", "open question") before committing. Same failure shape as fixing a footnote and not the paragraph it annotates — the fix is locally correct and globally false. In documents that authorize work, a stale conclusion is worse than no conclusion, because it reads as current.