Skip to content

Decisions

What was settled, why, and whether the next worker can find out before reopening it.

Decisions

A decision costs the discussion that produced it. Making the same one twice costs it twice and usually reaches the opposite answer, because the reasons were in the conversation and the conversation is gone. This area covers durable decisions, their discoverability, and implementations that contradict them.

4 moments

Every moment that names this one. Derived from the moments; this page keeps no list.

  1. watched a session undo last week's decision, for the reason it was madeA decision whose reason lived in a conversation cannot be reviewed, only re-argued — by a worker with less information than the first one had. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  2. went looking for why we chose this and found a chat logA decision that was reached in a session is stored where only that session can read it, so it is neither reviewable nor discoverable. cost: highconstant Why, and what to do →
  3. found code that contradicted a decision the repository had written downThe decision was recorded and the implementation went the other way, because nothing relates a decision to the paths it governs. cost: highoccasional Why, and what to do →
  4. watched a worker spend a day on an approach that had already been ruled outNegative results are the majority of experimental output and the part nobody records, so the search space is re-explored. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →