feat(decision-records): one template, and authoring discipline - #13
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Two templates invited a loophole: copying the accepted-record template authors a decision directly, around the sign-off that promotion exists to enforce. There is now one template, in drafts/ — a record is born a draft, and promote is the only door into accepted/ (it already mints the counter, flips the status, and rewrites the H1). The convention also never said how to write a record, and dutiful authors fill every section. The template, SKILL.md, and the scaffolded README now carry the discipline: cite the argument rather than restate it, delete a section with nothing to say (the template marks which may go), every sentence earns its place, and a record that keeps growing is usually several rulings sharing a file. Consequences collapses from three fixed buckets to one list of lines someone will act on. Deliberately NO length rule and no length check: measured against real corpora, a pure ruling runs a few dozen lines while a record that also carries specification legitimately runs hundreds (lanh-ai's median accepted body is 230 lines — a threshold would warn on all 55). What the discipline removes is padding, which shows up at every length.
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What
S2 of the convention refresh: kill the second template, and give the convention the authoring discipline it never had — without a length rule.
One template
Copying the accepted-record template was a loophole — it authors a decision directly, around the sign-off that promotion exists to enforce. The draft template in
drafts/is now the only one: a record is born a draft, andpromoteis the only door intoaccepted/(it already mints the counter, flips status, rewrites the H1).installscaffolds one template; consumer repos delete their committeddocs/decisions/_template.mdcopy when they bump the skill.The discipline
The template, SKILL.md, and the scaffolded README now say what was previously unsaid: write the ruling, not the debate — cite the argument, don't restate it; delete a section with nothing to say (the template marks which may go); every sentence earns its place; a record that keeps growing is usually several rulings sharing a file. Consequences collapses from three fixed buckets to one list of lines someone will act on.
Deliberately no length rule
An earlier revision of this PR carried a ~30-line budget and a 60-line
checkWARN. Measured against the real corpora, that was wrong on both ends: lanh-ai's median accepted body is 230 lines (a threshold warns on all 55 records, forever — noise people learn to ignore) because records there legitimately carry specification, while the axie drafts everyone agrees are over-written run only ~32 lines — line count never measured the problem. Padding shows up at every length; that is what the bullets remove. No check, no number.Verification
105 tests pass (install asserts the single template).
validate_skills.pyandpre-commit run --all-filesclean.