Use case

"Why is it built this way?" shouldn't require finding the one engineer who remembers.

Technical decisions get made in PR comments, design-doc threads, and standups — under real constraints that made sense at the time. Code comments explain what the code does. Almost nothing explains why this approach over the alternative, or what constraint forced the tradeoff.

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Why this keeps happening

A pull request captures the change, not the reasoning that led to it — and PR descriptions get terser, not more thorough, under deadline pressure. Design docs, when they exist, usually describe the chosen approach without a durable record of what else was considered and why it lost. Six months later, a new hire (or the original author) has to reconstruct the reasoning from git blame and institutional memory instead of just reading it.

Where this connects to Architecture Decision Records

If your team already writes ADRs, decision memory isn't a replacement — an ADR is a specific documented architecture decision, usually written deliberately for a significant, hard-to-reverse choice. Decision memory is the broader layer underneath it: every decision, technical or not, big or small, captured with less ceremony than a full ADR requires, so the reasoning behind the smaller calls that never get a formal ADR doesn't disappear either. See What Is an Architecture Decision Record? for the full comparison.

The decisions that matter most for an engineering team

Technology and vendor choices

Why this database, this queue, this SaaS vendor over the alternatives — and what tradeoff you accepted to get there.

Architecture and implementation approach

The shape of a system and why it's shaped that way, including constraints (deadline, team size, existing tech) that shaped it.

Deliberate tech debt

A shortcut taken on purpose, with an expected consequence — the decisions most likely to look like mistakes later if the reasoning isn't preserved.

Reversed decisions

An approach that was tried and abandoned — worth keeping precisely so it doesn't get proposed again by someone who wasn't there the first time.

How Cadenzova Decisions helps

Capture a technical decision the moment it's made — paste a screenshot of the PR comment or Slack thread where the call actually happened, or just type it in a sentence. It gets structured into the reason, the alternatives considered, the chosen approach, and what you expected to happen — then checked against your recent history so a decision that contradicts an earlier one gets flagged instead of silently shipping. When the outcome plays out, log it — successful, failed, reversed — so the next person asking "didn't we try this already?" gets a real answer.

Who this isn't for

A solo project or a team with very low decision velocity may not need a dedicated system — inline code comments and a lightweight ADR folder can cover it. This is most useful once a team is big enough, or has enough churn, that "ask the person who remembers" stops being a reliable strategy.

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