decision-records/ - this repo's own decision log (zone 1)

The repository-standards project's own ADRs, flat in this folder. Clients never receive copies - they adopt these decisions by reference from the living standard - always latest (ADR-004); the shipped tree carries only the empty log skeleton (standard/docs/decision-records/) for a client's own records.

Read the table instead of opening every record - the gist column says what each one settled.

Keep a record as short as the decision actually is. Length is a cost, not a sign of rigour: write the shortest thing that still answers why for someone who was not in the room, and let a section with nothing to say be one line. Comprehensive means every question is answered, not that each answer is long - a record nobody finishes reading fails at the only job it has. Before writing one at all, check it earns the shape: a choice that is cheap to reverse is a convention for CONTRIBUTING.md or a rule for SPEC.md, not a full Context/Options/Consequences record.

| 040 | The scale profile binds on reach, not on headcount | the picker's "flip at the second regular contributor" made a pair the enterprise ADR-011 exists to spare, and the discount it advertised was not the one the manifest gives - CI is a core required entry, personas and architecture are core, and the tracker bridge and curated release notes are required at no profile. scale now binds on what leaves the room (async handoff, contributors outside the conversation, outside readers of execution state, a release audience, users nobody here is); the 2-5 range gets a recorded route - scale with exceptions, or core carrying what a condition triggered - never a third profile | Accepted | | 041 | The bounded period of work is called a sprint | cycle was chosen against sprint to avoid importing the ceremony, and lost to use: readers stop at the unfamiliar word and ask whether it is a sprint. Renamed everywhere - docs/sprints/, sprint-open/sprint-close, sprint-guard.mjs, the work-sprints spec - with the borrowed word defined against what it usually carries: no points, no velocity as a commitment, an agreed date rather than a timebox, and no prescribed ceremony. Renames 028's vocabulary, not its substance | Accepted | | 042 | Intake is a required artifact, not a performed step | Step 0 (ADR-020) measured and asked but left nothing checkable behind - an agent that ran it and one that guessed produced the same diff. New rule R26 and a required docs/adoption-intake.md manifest entry give it the same standing PRODUCT/personas already have: never deferred, and self-verify now reports a skipped intake instead of missing it entirely | Accepted | | 043 | An existing decision process gets an exception, not a second home | Step 0 proposed docs/decision-records/ for git and vim alike, though both already run a working decision process (a mailing list, a maintainer-led process) older than this standard. Step 0 now detects the signal and asks instead of assuming: adopt this standard's ADR/BDR mechanism, or keep the repo's own process, recorded as a named exceptions entry against R5's manifest requirement - reusing the mechanism, no new rule | Accepted | | 044 | R18 splits by publishable unit, not by team | rails/rails's thirteen independently-versioned gems, each with its own changelog on one branch, is not a release-line problem (R23) - it is a different axis. The proposed reuse of the per-team sprint mechanism (ADR-028/041) was checked and does not fit: sprints split work in time, by team, scale-profile only; this is code structure, at every profile, present even for a solo two-package repo. R18 gets a second, independent clause instead - one changelog per unit, same one-mechanism rule, no new tooling | Accepted | | 045 | record-run feeds the existing corpus, consent-gated | the human-prompting corpus's own weakest point - every prompt written by people who already know the product - had no inbound channel from a real session. The new 21st shipped skill assembles the run that just happened into the existing prompts.md/runs/*.json shape, offers two consent levels (prompts only, or the full run), and sends nothing without a per-item yes, mirroring ADR-021's pattern for a second upstream channel | Accepted | | 046 | backlog.md is the one index; open questions and ideas get a type | Three separate index files meant the dashboard's Backlog tab could see build work but not standing doubts or unapproved features. One table now, distinguished by a type column (task/bug/open-question/idea), each with its own status vocabulary; decision records stay a separate stream since a record is a fork already taken and these rows are not; full deliberation stays in the per-topic file, the backlog row is only the index entry | Accepted | | 047 | The adoption ping is informed, not asked, and minimal | align-to-standards sends one anonymous ping per completed run (stack, standard version, drift, fully-aligned, day) to a Cloudflare Worker, disclosed in its output rather than gated behind a yes/no (voluntary prompts don't get answered); no repo name, no IP, no cross-ping identifier; opt-out via REPOSTDS_NO_TELEMETRY=1; v1 endpoint is the account's free workers.dev address, a custom subdomain deferred after Cloudflare's self-serve flow refused a bare subdomain | Accepted | | 048 | Gate artifacts are read for shape, not presence | ADR-042 made Gate 0's intake a required entry because a run that skipped it left no trace; Gates 2 and 5 had the same hole and a real adoption fell through it, reaching drift 0 having produced neither the health report nor the count the human decides on. Adds R27, the docs/adoption-assessment.md entry, and an adoption-gates guard reading shape and arithmetic - eight passes rated, the scope block summing to its own total, an owner role per item; the scope block also moves into the backlog template, where the adopter can actually see it, and Step 0's "plan-only or execute" becomes an intent whose consent is re-asked after Gate 2 | Accepted | | 049 | Discovery entries are typed; the stamp bounds asking | An entry recorded that a meeting happened but not what kind it was, why it was called, what came of it, or what else it touched - and ADR-024's Last reconciled: stamp, whose job is to stop a question being asked twice, was implemented by every consumer as a bound on reading too, hiding the one thing a dossier holds that no record or spec ever will: the explanation. Adds a typed entry header (Kind from a closed vocabulary, Purpose, Touches, per-entry Outcome, ## Explained here), mirrors it in the dossier table, and narrows rule 4 so research reads the whole dossier and cites it instead of re-deriving it. A generated index was considered and rejected as a second description of the same data | Accepted | | 050 | A decision record must name what would reopen it | discovery-digest step 4 greps every record's Revisit when to catch a decision sitting past its own trigger, and claimed to read all of them - 25 of 48 carried the field, and the 23 that did not included every record from 040 to 048. The field becomes required and decision-records-check fails without it, reading the section for shape (missing, empty, or still carrying the template's prompt all count as no signal); superseded and rejected records are exempt; an honest "nothing reopens this short of X" is a legal answer and an invented threshold is not; the 23 are backfilled from what each record already stated | Accepted | | 051 | Closing a backlog row is a relocation, not a deletion | the standard said when a row may close and left where it goes to an aside - "drop done rows on release, or let the Backlog.md tool archive them" - naming no destination, no rule and a third-party tool this project has never run. Deleting destroys findings that exist nowhere else, so adopters do neither: this repo's own pool holds finished, measured work under todo because closing it means throwing it away, and its 1.1.0 cut deleted seventeen rows, leaving two epics as a heading with no rows. A row now closes only once its content has a home - record, spec or dossier, plus the CHANGELOG for what shipped - and then moves to docs/backlog-archive.md carrying a where pointer; backlog-archive-check fails a row removed from the pool without reaching the archive, an empty where and a where that resolves to nothing, which makes "a row that cannot be relocated was not done" a diagnostic rather than an aspiration | Accepted, revised by 053 | | 052 | Alignment tracks a provenance commit, not a version string | a version string can no longer name one exact tree now that PRs bump PATCH by default, so update-to-version (renamed update-to-latest) stops deriving its delta from .standards-version and instead reads/writes a provenanceCommit field carrying the standards repo's own SHA; separately, the manifest gains a hand-maintained removedPaths list and self-verify gains a check that fails a repo still carrying a path the standard has removed, waivable only through the existing exceptions mechanism | Accepted | | 053 | The backlog view does not carry the archive | ADR-051 made "closed rows stay reachable in the view" binding and named the "show finished" chip, which 1.1.13 removed - leaving a requirement with no surface, blocking the first archive cut behind a design nobody needed. Measured rather than argued: the generator reads no archive at all, and Timeline, the first candidate, reads the sprint projection and would have needed a second unrelated input. The clause is narrowed to nothing - no tab, no control, at either profile - because "not hidden" was written against masking closed rows inside the pool view, and a file with its own name is not a mask; ADR-051's clauses, guard and where pointer are untouched | Accepted |

Add one row per record; the template ships in the tree (standard/docs/decision-records/adr/_template.md). Numbers are gapless and never reused.

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