What problem does it solve?
Documenting the rationale behind significant technical and product choices is often skipped or lost, leaving future engineers and product managers unable to understand why systems evolved a certain way. This Skill ensures decisions are recorded with context, alternatives, trade-offs, and consequences so teams inherit reasoning alongside code.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Structured ADR Template: Produces a Markdown ADR with metadata (date, status, deciders), context, decision, alternatives with pros/cons and effort estimates, consequences, and related links.
- Context Validation: Prompts for missing inputs and incorporates provided PRDs, RFCs, or technical specs before generating the final ADR.
- Governance & Immutability Guidance: Recommends ADR status (Proposed/Accepted/Deprecated/Superseded) and enforces the practice of creating new ADRs when decisions change.
- Use Cases: Capturing a migration decision (e.g., REST to GraphQL), choosing third-party vendors, or recording irreversible design choices during design reviews and technical spikes.
Quick Start
Draft an ADR summarizing the decision to migrate the public API from REST to GraphQL, list at least three alternatives with pros and cons, state the recommended option and its primary trade-offs, and save the output as ADR-001-migrate-to-graphql.md.