[hermitcrab]

I worked on the problem of recording 'design rationale' ~25 years ago. It is a big problem. Particulalry for long-lived artefacts, such as nuclear reactors. Nobody is quite sure exactly why decisions were made, as the original designers have forgotten, retired or been run over by buses. And this makes changing things difficult and risky. The biggest problem is that there is no real incentive for the people making the decisions to write down why they made them:

* they may see it as reducing their career security

* they may see it as opening them up to potential prosecution

* it takes a lot of time

[zain__t]

This is incredibly valuable context thank you. The career security point especially is something I hadn't fully articulated but explains why ADRs always die. Nobody wants to document themselves out of a job. The approach I'm exploring tries to remove the human writing step entirely passively capturing decisions from PRs, Slack threads, and tickets and auto drafting the rationale. The human just approves or dismisses in one click. The incentive problem flips instead of asking someone to document themselves, you're just asking them to approve something already written. Much lower friction. Curious from your 25 years on this do you think the passive capture angle addresses the incentive problem or does the resistance run deeper than just the writing effort?

[hermitcrab]

>The human just approves or dismisses in one click.

A busy engineer trying to hit a deadline is just going to do the easiest thing, aren't they?

Also there is all sorts of tacit knowledge that goes into a decision and I just don't think you are going to capture this automatically.

(I worked on it 25 years ago, rather than for 25 years.)