The Architecture of Knowing When Not to Answer

In most systems, missed answers and wrong answers are treated as equally bad failures. But in some domains—healthcare, finance, safety-critical systems—a single wrong answer can irreversibly damage user trust. This essay argues that system architects should optimize for asymmetric error costs, treating confident falsehoods as fundamentally different from abstention. By redesigning around precision and false-commit prevention rather than accuracy and recall, engineers can build systems where silence is a feature, not a bug.