Decision Record

The Decision Index

A decision is never written twice. The flow already writes every decision at full strength — kill-reasons, the survivor's fight, the user's confirmation — into the work file where it was made. What those records lack is a door: a fresh session judging a new design cannot trawl every done file for the one decision it is about to contradict. The door is .genius/DECIDED.md — one line per settled decision, each pointing at the fight that settled it.

The line

- **Raw SQL over any ORM** — schema drift burned v1; queries are few and
  hand-debugged. [The fight](checkout-rework/checkout-rework.log.md#discernment)

Verdict in bold, the why in one line, the link relative to .genius/. A decision that landed outside the flow — no work file, no battlefield — carries its why in the line itself, one honest sentence rather than a verdict alone.

The test

An index line is earned by one question: would a future stranger re-fight this? — propose the killed thing again, redo the settled study, "fix" the deliberate deviation. Most decisions fail it: they bind only their own work. The ones that pass: architectural shape, boundary no-s, deliberate deviations from the obvious path, constraints invisible in the code, rejections that will be re-proposed by someone who wasn't there. And a seam or convention a slice established that later work will build against — close-out asks the test of the contract's established layer first, block by block, because a builder in the next work re-derives whatever no line lets it find.

The discipline

• Written when the record is finished — Tenacity's close-out asks the test of everything the work settled; a standalone /architect study writes its line when the design is confirmed. Never a second write-up: the line points, the record carries.
• Read before contradicting, and before introducing. The index is the ammunition /discern and /architect load: a design that touches a settled decision either dies of the fight on record or names the decision it overturns and why. It is also where an inventor or a builder looks before introducing a seam or a convention, and reuses the one it finds.
• Overturning moves the line. A new fight that beats a settled decision rewrites its line — new verdict, new link — and the old record stays as written. The index carries what the project believes now; the files carry how it came to believe it.

Not a second place decisions get written — a line that restates the fight will drift from it. Not a diary: a decision that fails the stranger test gets no line, and that is the discipline working.