decision-records

decision-records is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ericrisco/rsc-harness. It costs 76 tokens per session (2,840 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision record is a short, numbered document that preserves why an important technical choice was made, which options were considered, and what trade-offs it has.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps record choices such as databases, frameworks, vendors, authentication models, or monolith-versus-microservices architecture.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from repeatedly revisiting costly decisions after the original reasoning is forgotten. Later changes can supersede the record without erasing its history.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Good fit It helps record choices such as databases, frameworks, vendors, authentication models, or monolith-versus-microservices architecture.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/decision-records
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.

Any agent
npx skills add ericrisco/rsc-harness --skill decision-records
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericrisco/rsc-harness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 decision-records

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/decision-records/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/decision-records)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/decision-records"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/decision-records/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for decision-records

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/decision-records"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/decision-records.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,840 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00076 $0.02840
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01420
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00568
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00284

Measured 5d ago against content hash f2828503ef9d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

decision-records 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 5d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/verify.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

skills/decision-records/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Decision Records — Freeze the Why Before It Evaporates

A consequential choice got made. Capture it as one short, immutable, numbered ADR: the context that forced it, the real options weighed, the decision, and what it costs you both ways. Six months from now this file is the only thing standing between you and re-litigating the whole thing.

You own the durable single-decision artifact — an Architecture/Any Decision Record (ADR). Not a meeting recap, not a runbook, not a spec. One bounded choice, recorded so the reasoning survives the people who made it.

The one test: is this even ADR-worthy?

Write an ADR iff the choice is costly to reverse OR future-you will ask "why did we do it this way". Everything else is noise — an ADR for a trivial reversible tweak is just paperwork, and ADRs lose all their value the moment they become forced ceremony (this is the consistent message from Fowler and the AWS Architecture Blog).

Worth an ADR Skip it
Postgres vs DynamoDB for the primary store Which lint rule to enable
Monolith vs microservices for v1 Renaming a local variable
Build vs buy auth (Clerk vs roll-your-own) Bumping a patch dependency
Dropping REST for tRPC across the API Choosing a CSS color token
Picking Hetzner over AWS for hosting A reversible feature flag default

If you can rip it out in an afternoon and nobody will ever ask why, don't write an ADR. Decide, move on.

Decide home + naming once

Pick a storage convention before the first record, and never spawn a competing second log. Default to the project's existing convention if one exists.

Naming school Looks like Use when
Numeric-prefix (adr-tools / MADR) 0007-choose-postgres.md You need stable IDs to cross-reference for supersession — the default
Imperative verb-noun choose-database.md Tiny log, no supersession expected, humans browse by topic

Prefer numeric-prefix: NNNN-title-with-dashes.md. Stable IDs are what make "Superseded by ADR-0012" mean something.

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 5d ago First seen · 203 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A f2828503ef9d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

decision-records is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericrisco/rsc-harness (74 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 2,840 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-09-03.

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