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When a project decision needs to guide future work, put it somewhere durable and easy to find—not only in a chat. A concise architecture decision record (ADR) can preserve what the team chose, why it chose it, and what trade-offs follow, so a later developer or AI-assisted session has the context to work from.
Why a decision in chat can disappear
Derek Wang’s essay, “A decision you didn’t write down isn’t a decision”, makes a practical argument about AI-assisted software work: a later session may not have access to an earlier conversation. If a key choice exists only in that conversation, the next person—or tool—may miss it.
Wang describes memory drift, architecture drift, and repeated debates as patterns he has encountered. He offers these as practitioner observations, not quantified findings: the essay does not establish how often these problems occur or prove that missing written decisions cause them. His phrase “A conversation is not a contract” is a memorable way to express the risk, not a formal standard.
What an ADR records
An architecture decision record captures an important choice along with the context and consequences that make it understandable later. The Michael Nygard decision-record template provides a useful lightweight starting point:
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- Title: Identify the decision clearly.
- Status: Show whether it is proposed, accepted, rejected, deprecated, or superseded.
- Context: Explain what prompted the choice and any relevant constraints.
- Decision: State what the team chose.
- Consequences: Record what the choice makes easier or harder, including important trade-offs.
The ADR community describes a project’s maintained collection of records as its decision log. Its ADR resources include multiple template approaches. Nygard’s format is one practical option, not a universal requirement. Choose a level of detail the team can maintain while still preserving the reasoning a future reader will need.
How to put decisions to work
- Record significant choices near the project. Keep the file where people making later changes can find it, rather than leaving it in a chat history or an unrelated location.
- Write the decision and its rationale. State the context, chosen approach, status, and consequences. Include relevant alternatives and trade-offs when they help explain why this option was selected.
- Make changes to decisions visible. When a choice changes, mark the earlier record as superseded or otherwise show its relationship to the new one. Avoid leaving conflicting records that both appear current.
- Surface the record in the workflow. Link or point to relevant decisions where they are needed for implementation or review. Wang cautions that a record that is never read or checked cannot, by itself, prevent drift; writing it down is not an enforcement mechanism.
Choose a format the team can keep current
Since several ADR templates exist, compare them against the work the team actually does. A useful format should make it practical to capture the decision and its reasoning without creating more upkeep than the team will sustain.
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- Detail: Does the template ask for enough context and consequences to make the choice intelligible later?
- Alternatives: Does it provide space to explain options considered and their pros and cons, where that information matters?
- Lifecycle: Can readers see whether a decision is current, rejected, deprecated, or superseded?
- Location and workflow: Is the record easy to find and likely to be consulted where the decision affects work?
Wang gives counts from two of his own repositories—20 ADRs for TradeOMS and 11 for SmartQuant—as examples from his practice. They are not an industry benchmark or independently verified measurement, and they do not show that a particular number of records produces better outcomes.
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