Architecture Without Accidents: Recording Decisions
A practical way to turn important architecture decisions into a clear and useful history of the project.
Architecture becomes fragile not when a team chooses an imperfect technology, but when nobody remembers why the choice was made.
Record context, not only the outcome
A short Architecture Decision Record should answer four questions:
- What problem are we solving?
- Which constraints shaped the choice?
- What did we decide?
- Which consequences do we consciously accept?
# Use local MDX for internal articles
Context: editorial content must be versioned with the code.
Decision: store articles in content/posts/.
Consequence: publishing requires a pull request and build validation.The sign of a good decision record
A new team member can read it six months later and understand not only what works today, but why an apparently simpler alternative was rejected.
An ADR does not replace system documentation. It preserves the causal link between a problem, a decision, and its trade-offs.