documentation-and-adrs

Architectural decision records capture the reasoning behind significant technical decisions, ensuring context isn't lost as projects evolve. This Skill enforces ADR templates, lifecycle states, and inline documentation standards to preserve that rationale.

Create an ADR when deciding on frameworks, design patterns, or API changes. Documenting these major architectural decisions ensures the known trade-offs, alternatives considered, and consequences are preserved for onboarding engineers and agents.

Start writing architecture decision records by creating your first ADR documenting a major decision and placing it under docs/decisions/ with a sequential ADR number like ADR-001. The Skill provides templates and guidelines for this process.

The best way to maintain ADR lifecycle states and agent guidelines is to enforce ADR templates and inline documentation standards. This approach documents known trade-offs and provides agent-oriented guidelines like CLAUDE.md for onboarding engineers and agents.

Yes, you can use architecture decision records to document API changes and design pattern choices. The Skill provides templates and guidelines specifically for architecture decisions, API changes, and design choices, including known trade-offs and consequences.

A limitation of ADRs is that they only document decisions already made, requiring manual lifecycle maintenance to stay relevant. You must enforce sequential numbering and update inline documentation standards continuously to prevent context loss as projects evolve.