decision-record

A template and process for recording important product decisions, including the context, alternatives, reasons, people involved, and effects on the work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after feature-scoping choices, priority changes, technical decisions, trade-offs, or changes in project direction.
Why use it?
It preserves why a product direction was chosen, so teams can understand past decisions without relying on scattered conversations or memory.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/bmbouter/redhat-agents/decision-record
Any agent
npx skills add bmbouter/redhat-agents --skill decision-record
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bmbouter/redhat-agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 474 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 $0.00025 $0.00474
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00237
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00095
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00047

Measured 2d ago against content hash 0afb3490d899, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

decision-record 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.

module/skills/decision-record/SKILL.md · 70 lines

What it actually says

When to Use

After any significant product decision — feature scoping, priority changes, architectural choices, trade-offs, scope cuts, or direction changes.

Instructions

1. Capture the decision

Ask the PM:

  • What was decided? (one clear statement)
  • What triggered this decision? (customer feedback, technical constraint, strategic shift)
  • What alternatives were considered? (at least 2, ideally 3+)
  • Why was this option chosen? (criteria, trade-offs)
  • Who was involved? (decision maker, consulted, informed)
  • What does this affect? (epics, teams, timelines, customers)

2. Draft the record

## Decision Record: [Decision Title]

**Date**: <date>
**Status**: Decided / Proposed / Superseded
**Decision maker**: [Name/role]

### Context
[What prompted this decision — the problem or question]

### Decision
[Clear statement of what was decided]

### Alternatives Considered

| Option | Pros | Cons |
|--------|------|------|
| **[Chosen option]** | ... | ... |
| [Alternative A] | ... | ... |
| [Alternative B] | ... | ... |

### Rationale
[Why the chosen option won — which criteria mattered most]

### Consequences
- **Epics affected**: [List with links]
- **Timeline impact**: [Acceleration, delay, or neutral]
- **Teams affected**: [Who needs to know]
- **Customer impact**: [Visible change, migration needed, or transparent]

### Stakeholders
| Role | Name | Status |
|------|------|--------|
| Decision maker | ... | Decided |
| Consulted | ... | Agreed / Disagreed |
| Informed | ... | Notified / Pending |

3. Store the record

Ask the PM where to put it:

  • As a Jira comment on the relevant epic
  • As a Confluence page
  • As a local file in the repo

Present for review before posting.

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 · 70 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 0afb3490d899

Subscribe to this mod's changes

decision-record is a skill published in the GitHub repository bmbouter/redhat-agents (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 474 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 2026-08-31.

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