---
topic: how we work
status: accepted
date: 2026-09-17
deciders: jochen
reconstructed: false
extends: 0080-the-development-cycle-is-checked.md
---

# 81. A decision nothing cites is not yet in the chain

## Context

[ADR 0080](0080-the-development-cycle-is-checked.md) made the development cycle checked — but its
checks covered designs, issues and research, not the decisions themselves. Measuring showed why
that matters: 19 of 70 records were cited by nothing — no design doc's `decisions:`, no research
`became:`, no issue, no other record. Among them sat load-bearing decisions (the credential flow,
the module-runtime cluster), and the cost had already been paid once in practice: a stale premise
about an orphaned decision survived in working memory precisely because no pointer led to the
record that had settled it.

## Decision

Every **accepted** decision must be reachable from the cycle: cited by a design doc's frontmatter
(`decisions:` — a governing citation, not a prose mention), a research overview, an issue report,
a `00-META` document, or another record's `extends`/`supersedes` chain.
[`cycle.py`](../00-META/checks/cycle.py) refuses orphans. Proposed records are exempt — a record
under consideration has no home yet — and superseded records are reachable through their
supersession chain by construction.

The 19 orphans were given true homes in the same change: the module-runtime cluster
(0044–0049, 0053–0055) into the connectivity, controller, protocol, writing and model-access
designs; the build decisions (0072, 0076) into the building design; 0021 into the playbook that
implements it; the process records were already reachable once `00-META` counted as a source.

Taken together with 0080, the practice has a name the industry will recognise:
**spec-driven development, with provenance** — a decision is the *why*, the design doc is the
spec, `code:` names the implementation, and the lab beds are the conformance tests. What the
common form leaves implicit, the cycle makes checked: the spec itself must trace to a decision,
and the decision must be findable from the work it governs.

## Consequences

Following pointers now reaches every accepted decision, so a cleared session (or a person) can
trust the frontmatter graph as the whole map. The check is reachability, not truth: a citation
placed wrongly still lies, and reading remains the job.

## References

- [ADR 0080](0080-the-development-cycle-is-checked.md) — the cycle this completes.
- [`00-META/process/00-overview.md`](../00-META/process/00-overview.md) — the flow.