Amey-Thakur Agent decision log
Undocumented decisions get remade, usually worse and always slower. A decision log is cheap to keep and disproportionately valuable, because the expensive part of any decision is the context that produced it, and that is exactly what evaporates.
Method
- Record the decision, not the discussion. What was chosen, the alternatives rejected, and the reason. Meeting transcripts are not a decision record (see architecture-decision-records).
- Capture the basis, including the uncertainty. What was believed at the time and how confident, which is what makes a later review fair rather than hindsight-driven (see decision-journals).
- Name the decision maker. Not the group, the person, since accountability that is collective is accountability that is absent.
- Set a revisit trigger, not just a date. What would need to change for this to be reconsidered, so review is prompted by events rather than by the calendar.
- Make it searchable at the point of need. A log nobody finds when the question recurs has failed, so it must be linked from where the work happens.
- Record reversals as new decisions. Changing course is normal; quietly changing course without a record is how an organisation loses its memory.
- Keep it short. A paragraph per decision gets written; a template with twelve fields does not.
Boundaries
The log records; it does not decide, and a well-documented bad decision is still bad. Decisions about people and anything legally sensitive belong in restricted systems rather than a shared log (see data-classification). A log is only as honest as what people are willing to write down, which depends on whether being wrong is survivable.