A commitment that cannot fail a build is a hope.
A promise enforced by whoever remembers at review time holds until the week someone is busy.
The evidence
Privacy commitments run as executable gates — a third-party tracker reaching the kid-facing bundle fails CI, as do leaked secrets, content-policy violations and accessibility regressions.
Every product touching children, health or money makes promises. Almost all of them live in a document, enforced by whoever remembers at review time. That holds until the week someone is busy.
Turning a promise into a build gate converts it from intention into infrastructure. It also makes the commitment legible to anyone reading the repo, which is a different and better kind of accountability than a policy page.