The prior art already had our recursion base-case

Parent: stages-and-gates · Reference: prior-art-task-decomposition

The stopping rule that every task-decomposition tradition flags as the hard problem is the same P×C base-case we use in recursive-stages — written ~50 years earlier.

We said "recurse only as deep as a gate is worth it / capped by gate cost √(2δM)"; Annett's HTA (1971) said "recurse until probability of failure × cost of failure is acceptable." Same logic: decompose/gate only where the expected cost of error still justifies it. We independently rediscovered P×C. (Cf. the real-options / cost-of-defect reasoning in necessity and the checkpoint bound in reliability-and-checkpointing.)

HTA's P×C stopping rule is our "is a gate still worth it" base-case under a different name — the honest lineage for recursive-stages.