vibe-decision-journal

vibe-decision-journal is a skill for Claude Code from ash1794/vibe-engineering. It costs 48 tokens per session (1,269 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A documentation helper that records important architecture decisions in ADR format, a standard short record of a technical choice and its reasoning. It can extract decisions from code changes, conversations, or explicit choices and avoid duplicate records.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after significant design or behavior changes, before committing staged changes, or when the same design question keeps returning. It is not for routine naming, formatting, or temporary choices.
Why use it?
It keeps decisions from being lost in code history, making the reasons behind lasting design choices easier to find later.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the vibe-engineering plugin — 38 skills shipped together

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 skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/decision-journal
Any agent
npx skills add ash1794/vibe-engineering --skill decision-journal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ash1794/vibe-engineering

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install vibe-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 38 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for vibe-decision-journal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/decision-journal.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/decision-journal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/decision-journal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/decision-journal.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,269 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 5.1 $0.00048 $0.01269
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00634
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00254
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00127

Measured 6d ago against content hash d018b3a485bb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vibe-decision-journal 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 6d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugins/vibe-engineering/skills/decision-journal/SKILL.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

vibe-decision-journal

Decisions happen whether you document them or not. This skill makes sure they don't vanish into git history.

When to Use This Skill

  • After making any significant design, architecture, or behavioral choice
  • Before committing — extract implicit decisions from staged diffs
  • When you realize "we keep coming back to this question"
  • After a session where multiple design choices were made without explicit recording

When NOT to Use This Skill

  • Trivial implementation choices (variable naming, formatting, import order)
  • Decisions already captured and reviewed
  • Temporary/reversible choices (which test to run first)

Modes

Mode 1: Automatic Extraction (from staged diffs)

Use when committing or when the user says "what decisions did we make?"

  1. Read the staged diff:

    git diff --cached
    
  2. Analyze for implicit decisions — Look for changes that represent choices:

    • New abstractions, patterns, or data structures introduced
    • API contracts defined or changed
    • Caching/storage/retry strategies chosen
    • Error handling approaches selected
    • Behavioral changes (not just refactors)
    • Configuration or default values set
  3. Filter out non-decisions:

    • Process/workflow choices ("commit now", "run tests")
    • Tooling setup ("install package X")
    • Pure refactors with no behavioral change
    • Diagnostic observations ("X causes Y")
    • Trivial changes (formatting, imports, variable renames)
  4. Deduplicate against existing decisions:

    • Read existing decisions from docs/decisions/ or project decision log
    • Skip exact matches (same question + same decision)
    • Flag potential conflicts (same topic, different conclusion) — present both to user
    • If a new decision countermands an old one, mark the old one as Superseded by: [new decision]
  5. Present each extracted decision to the user for review using AskUserQuestion:

    • Accept — record as-is
    • Accept with edits — user refines the wording
    • Not a decision — discard (it was a refactor, not a choice)
    • Already captured — skip

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 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. 6d ago First seen · 152 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A d018b3a485bb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vibe-decision-journal is a skill published in the GitHub repository ash1794/vibe-engineering (10 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 1,269 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-31.

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