Decided Artifacts

RAC artifacts

RAC models product artifacts as typed, deterministic Markdown files. Five types exist: requirement, decision, roadmap, prompt, design. Type is inferred from ## section headings, never declared. Frontmatter carries identity only and is machine-generated.

Hard constraints

• Write artifact files only inside the host project's decisions directory (decisions/ by default; if the project keeps artifacts elsewhere, confirm the path before writing). Never create or edit RAC artifacts outside that directory, and never modify files elsewhere in the project on this skill's behalf.
• Never hand-write or alter an artifact id or its frontmatter identity block. decided new mints ids. Do not edit .decisions/config.yaml.
• Do not invent sections or frontmatter fields. Use decided schema <type> to see what a type expects.
• Validation must pass before the work is done: decided validate exits 0 and, if the project uses relationship links, decided relationships <dir> --validate exits 0.

Create an artifact

decided new requirement decisions/requirements/<slug>.md

decided new <type> <path> writes the canonical template with a minted id. It never overwrites an existing file. Then edit the file and replace every TODO placeholder with real content, keeping the ## headings intact. Requirements use testable statements of the form - [REQ-001] ... under ## Requirements.

If the project has no .decisions/config.yaml yet, run decided init once at the project root first (optionally --key <PREFIX> for the id prefix).

Read and classify

decided inspect <file>          # type, confidence, present/missing sections
decided schema                  # list registered types
decided schema <type>           # sections for one type; --template prints a starter

An invalid but recognisable file still classifies as its type and then fails validation — classification and validation are separate.

Validate

decided validate <file-or-dir>              # structural checks; exit 0 = pass
decided relationships <dir> --validate      # link integrity across the corpus

Treat errors as blocking. Warnings are advisory (commonly a missing recommended section); fix them when the content exists to fill them.

Update and improve

decided improve <file>          # missing required/recommended sections, with prompts

Edit the Markdown directly, preserving the heading structure and the frontmatter block untouched. Re-run decided validate after every edit.

Link artifacts

Linking uses ## Related <Type> sections (for example ## Related Decisions), one artifact id per line. Ids resolve from an explicit ## ID section, a <letters>-<digits> filename prefix (for example adr-004), or the filename stem. Check a link target resolves before adding it:

decided resolve <id> <dir>
decided find <text> <dir>

After adding links, run decided relationships <dir> --validate.

Output for automation

Most commands accept --json for machine-readable output, and exit codes follow the documented contract (0 pass, non-zero failure). Prefer --json when a result feeds a script or a decision.