"Proposed" does not mean "maybe" (antipattern)

Situation. A personal-brand SaaS in early product discovery: a whole go-to-market direction on the table - how selling would work, a template marketplace, a membership module. Exciting, plausible, and undecided.

What happened. The direction got written up as ADRs and BDRs with status Proposed. It felt diligent - everything documented! But in MADR, Proposed means a decision awaiting ratification, not an idea we might pursue. The decision log now implied forks had been reached and taken, when in truth nobody had decided anything. Anyone reading the records later would inherit commitments that were never made.

The antipattern. Dressing speculation as records. It pollutes the decision log's one job - being an honest ledger of forks actually taken - and it is worse than writing nothing, because it carries false authority.

What the standard does about it. A first-class ideas space (docs/ideas/<slug>.md) where a maybe is explored end-to-end - business and technical shape included - with its own statuses (idea -> exploring -> approved | parked | dropped). No ADR/BDR/spec is minted until the idea is approved; on approval it graduates into the normal flow and the idea doc links what it became.

Where it lives now. standard/docs/ideas/, the taxonomy's "Ideas / discovery before a decision" section, ADR-010 (the lifecycle), the records README rule "not a record until approved".