adr

A command that records important, difficult-to-reverse technical choices as Architecture Decision Records, or ADRs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to add a decision to the memory-bank backlog after checking the existing decisions and relevant code. It is intended for choices with meaningful alternatives and lasting consequences.
Why use it?
It preserves the reasons and trade-offs behind decisions so future developers can understand why the code works that way.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/fockus/skill-memory-bank/adr
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fockus/skill-memory-bank
Per session 10 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 815 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00010 $0.00815
Opus 5 $0.00005 $0.00407
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00163
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00081

Measured 2d ago against content hash c202d9e21a2f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

adr scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/adr.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ADR: $ARGUMENTS

0. Validate arguments

If $ARGUMENTS is empty, stop and ask the user for the decision title. Do not proceed with an empty title.

1. When to record an ADR (3-gate)

Offer an ADR only when all three are true (from grill-with-docs):

  1. Hard to reverse — the cost of changing your mind later is meaningful.
  2. Surprising without context — a future reader will look at the code and wonder "why on earth did they do it this way?"
  3. The result of a real trade-off — there were genuine alternatives and you picked one for specific reasons.

If any gate fails, skip the ADR: an easy-to-reverse decision will just be reversed; an unsurprising one needs no explanation; a no-alternative one records nothing beyond "we did the obvious thing." When the user explicitly asks for an ADR, honour it — but note which gate is weak.

2. Context

  • Read ./.memory-bank/backlog.md — existing ADRs live in the ## Architectural decisions (ADR) section.
  • If no ## Architectural decisions section exists, create it at the bottom of backlog.md under a --- divider.
  • Study the relevant part of the codebase so the decision has real grounding.
  • Make sure this decision (or a close variant) has not already been recorded or rejected — search with grep -i "<keyword>" .memory-bank/backlog.md.

3. Determine the next ADR number

grep -oE 'ADR-[0-9]+' .memory-bank/backlog.md | sort -V | tail -1
# Take the numeric part, add 1. Zero-pad to 3 digits (ADR-001, ADR-002, ...).
# If no existing ADR → start from ADR-001.

Numbering is monotonic — never reuse an ID, even if an ADR was later rejected or replaced.

4. Draft the decision

Show the user a draft before writing. Required parts:

  • Context — what problem are we solving, what constraints exist, why this decision is needed now
  • Decision — what exactly we decided to do
  • Alternatives — which options were considered and why each was rejected
  • Consequences — what changes because of this decision, what trade-offs, what becomes easier / harder

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 78 lines · 10 tokens per session scan A c202d9e21a2f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

adr is a command published in the GitHub repository fockus/skill-memory-bank (25 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 10 tokens to every session and 815 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.