Decision Record
A durable, reviewable record of a choice: what was decided, why, and what it produced.
A decision record is a small, durable note that keeps the rationale for a choice attached to its result.
Why it matters
Most decisions evaporate. Six months later nobody remembers why the architecture is the way it is, so it rots or gets re-litigated from scratch. When agents are making choices too, the volume explodes and the amnesia gets worse. A decision record keeps the why next to the what.
In practice
Each consequential choice writes a record: the decision, the constraint or claim behind it, the work it triggered, and the proof it shipped. Reviewable, durable, queryable later by a human or an agent.
Where it shows up in my work
helaix treats decision records as a first-class doc surface. I render them publicly as the decision certificates on this site, pulled from a live decision graph instead of written by hand.