---
status: accepted
date: 2026-08-23
deciders: jochen
reconstructed: false
---

# 26. Every decision is a record; there is no ledger

## Context

HQ carried a decision ledger at its root: a chronological table of forty-one numbered
decisions, each with who decided and a pointer to where the reasoning lived. It was created
deliberately, to make decisions findable and to give a home to decisions too small to warrant
a document.

By the time the decision records were back-filled
([ADR 0024](0024-the-numbering-is-the-flow.md)) the ledger had become three things at once,
and only one of them was still needed.

Classified, its forty-one entries were: ten restating a record, eleven restating design
documents, fifteen describing how this repository works — with the reasoning in a README rather
than anywhere citable — three small rules with no home at all, and two superseded stubs.

So the ledger was mostly a copy. Worse, it was a **hand-maintained index**, which
[ADR 0022](0022-status-lives-in-frontmatter.md) had just finished rejecting for the
decision-record index on the grounds that it had drifted after a single addition. Keeping one
copy of that pattern while removing another is not a position.

It had also produced a naming collision that a directory listing makes plain: `DECISIONS.md`
beside `02-DECISIONS/`, holding different things.

## Considered options

1. **Keep the ledger.** Rejected. It duplicates the records, restates status, and is the exact
   hand-maintained index this repository decided against elsewhere.
2. **Keep it, renamed, for small decisions only.** Rejected, and this is the option worth
   arguing with — it is genuinely useful to record a decision without writing a document. But a
   decision small enough to be one table row is almost always a **rule** rather than a
   decision, and a rule belongs in [`how-we-build.md`](../00-META/how-we-build.md) where it is
   enforced and where its reasoning is kept. That is where the three orphans went.
3. **Every decision is a record; nothing else.** Chosen. This is how the sibling HQ repository
   for the PAPA platform works, and it has no ledger of any kind.

## Decision

**If a decision is worth recording, it is worth a record. If it is not worth a record, it is
not recorded.**

`02-DECISIONS` holds every decision. There is no ledger, no index file, and no central status
of any kind. The chronological view — decisions in the order they were taken — is *generated*
from record frontmatter, which is what the ledger was actually for.

Content that was only in the ledger was rehomed rather than dropped:

| Was | Went to |
|---|---|
| Decisions about how this repository works | Records [0019](0019-hq-is-its-own-repository.md)–[0025](0025-hq-is-the-source-of-the-constitution.md) |
| Small rules with no record | [`how-we-build.md`](../00-META/how-we-build.md) — the package rule, and two already there |
| Lab decisions not stated in the design | [`03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md`](../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md) |
| "Deliberately not decided" | The research effort and design document each question belongs to |
| Unowned observations | [`04-ISSUES`](../04-ISSUES/) ([ADR 0023](0023-issues-have-a-front-door.md)) |

## Consequences

- One place to look, and nothing to keep in sync. The collision between the ledger and the
  record folder is gone.
- Structural parity with the sibling repository on decisions, which
  [ADR 0024](0024-the-numbering-is-the-flow.md) deliberately broke on folder numbering. The
  divergence is now exactly one thing, and it is the one thing that was argued for.
- **Writing a record is now the only way to record a decision, and a record is more work than
  a table row.** The real risk is that a small decision goes unrecorded because nobody wanted
  to write a document. The mitigation is that a small decision is usually a rule, and
  `how-we-build.md` takes rules cheaply — but this is a cost, not a solved problem, and it is
  the thing to watch.
- The chronological view now depends on the generator existing and being run. It did not
  before.
- Two superseded ledger stubs had no record of their own. The position that documentation
  lives inside the code repository is now recorded only as superseded context in
  [ADR 0019](0019-hq-is-its-own-repository.md); the system-container position is explained in
  [ADR 0016](0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md). Neither is lost.

## References

- The sibling PAPA HQ repository: root holds only agent instructions and a README; every
  decision is a numbered record, and its graduation playbook has no path for an unrecorded
  decision.
- [ADR 0022](0022-status-lives-in-frontmatter.md) — the hand-maintained-index argument this
  applies consistently.