The Record · 4 decisions
Decisions
Dated records of choices made under real constraints, including what was rejected, what it costs both ways, and what would reopen the question.
What is a decision record?
A decision records a choice made at a moment when the answer was not obvious: what the situation was, what was chosen, which alternatives were genuinely weighed and why they lost, what it costs in both directions, and what evidence would reopen it.
Why they exist
A standard says what to do. It cannot say why this was chosen over the alternatives, so the reasoning survives only in one person's memory and the question gets re-litigated every few months. Recording the decision is also the only way a future reader can tell a deliberate deferral from an oversight.
How they influence engineering
Decisions derive from principles and constrain standards, they sit between the two. The reopening criteria matter most: the evidence a deferred decision is waiting for usually arrives disguised as something small, and nobody recognises it unless the trigger was written down in advance.
Decision Index
4 TOTALStop at the smallest scope that solves the problem, and state what would justify going further.
An architecture defined by its refusals, orchestrate, never reimplement.
A consumer should be able to take the smallest thing it wants and pay only for what that thing imports.
Isolate customers physically rather than by a column, and pay for it in operations.