`.github/pull_request_template.md`

The questions a pull request has to answer before a reviewer reads a line of the diff: what changed, why, what it makes untrue elsewhere, and how it was verified.

What it is for

So the reviewer spends their attention on the change rather than on reconstructing it. Most review time goes to working out what the author was trying to do. A template that answers that up front converts it into review of the actual work.

It also makes the two easiest omissions visible: a decision that got made and not recorded, and a spec that should have moved and did not.

What goes in here

What and why. Which decision records this touches or creates. The test plan. The checklist of gates that must be green.

The ADR line is the one that earns its place. A change forcing a contestable choice usually makes it silently - the template asks in the one moment when the answer is still fresh and the cost of writing it is a paragraph.

What does not go in here

A ceremony nobody reads. A twenty-line checklist gets ticked wholesale. Each item should be one somebody would actually stop for.

Anything a guard already checks. If CI proves it, the template asking about it is theatre that trains people to tick without reading.

A description of the diff. The diff describes itself. The template is for what the diff cannot say.

Decisions behind it

merge, not copy. Most repositories already have a template with things this standard has no opinion about; it contributes its questions rather than replacing yours.
Scale profile. A solo repository reviewing its own pull requests gets the same value from pre-pr-review, which reads the diff with fresh context, without filling a form for an audience of one.

Reference

Status. Optional - arrives at the scale profile, not at core.
How it arrives. merge - combine the standard's content with what the repo already has, keeping both (ignore files, CI that already has jobs)
Shipped form. read it in the standard's own tree

The rule that requires it

A contestable, re-litigable choice MUST be recorded as a decision record

See it in the spec