0. Use Architecture Decision Records

Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-05-11
Deciders: Engineering team

Context

As the project evolves, decisions about technology, patterns, and trade-offs accumulate. Without a structured record, the rationale behind choices becomes tribal knowledge, making it hard for new contributors to understand why things are the way they are, and easy to re-debate settled questions.

Decision

We will document all significant architecture decisions as ADRs stored in architecture/ADRs/. Each ADR captures the context, the options considered, the decision made, and the consequences.

ADRs are: - Numbered sequentially (ADR-NNNN) - Written at the time the decision is made - Immutable once accepted — superseded by a new ADR, never edited retroactively - Short — one decision per document

Consequences

• New contributors can understand the history and reasoning behind the architecture without asking.
• Decisions are not re-litigated unless a new ADR explicitly supersedes an existing one.
• There is a small overhead of writing an ADR for each significant decision.