adr-author

A guide for writing Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), short documents that record an important technical decision, its alternatives, and its consequences.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to document decisions about databases, frameworks, APIs, system design, or other choices that affect multiple parts of a project and are costly to reverse.
Why use it?
It preserves the reasoning behind architecture choices so future maintainers can understand why the system was built that way.

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/jayrha/agentskills/adr-author
Any agent
npx skills add JayRHa/AgentSkills --skill adr-author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JayRHa/AgentSkills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 111 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,728 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 $0.00111 $0.01728
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.00864
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00346
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00173

Measured 2d ago against content hash 45e13c41e3b3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

adr-author 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/new_adr.py), 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.

adr-author/SKILL.md · 131 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ADR Author

Overview

An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short, immutable document that captures one architecturally significant decision: the forces at play (context), the realistic options, the option chosen, and the consequences that follow. ADRs form an append-only log so future maintainers can reconstruct why the system looks the way it does — not just what it does.

This skill produces rigorous ADRs that distinguish facts from opinions, force an honest options comparison, and make consequences (good, bad, and neutral) explicit.

Keywords: ADR, architecture decision record, design decision, technical decision log, MADR, Nygard, trade-off analysis, options matrix, decision rationale, superseded decision, build vs buy, framework selection, database choice, API style, architecture governance.

When a Decision Deserves an ADR

Write an ADR when the decision is architecturally significant — it is costly to reverse, affects multiple teams/components, or constrains future choices. Use the checklist in references/significance-checklist.md. If none of the criteria fire, capture it as a code comment or a ticket instead, not an ADR.

Workflow

  1. Confirm significance. Run the decision through references/significance-checklist.md. If it does not qualify, tell the user and suggest a lighter-weight record.

  2. Assign an ID and locate the log. ADRs live in a directory such as docs/adr/ or doc/architecture/decisions/. Number them sequentially with a zero-padded prefix: 0001-use-postgresql.md, 0002-adopt-rest-over-graphql.md. Use scripts/new_adr.py to scan the directory, compute the next number, and scaffold the file.

  3. Gather context. Interview the user (or read the codebase) to extract the forces: business drivers, technical constraints, team skills, deadlines, existing systems, non-functional requirements (performance, security, cost, operability). Separate objective facts from assumptions — label assumptions explicitly.

Read the full file on GitHub · 131 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. 2d ago First seen · 131 lines · 111 tokens per session scan A 45e13c41e3b3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

adr-author is a skill published in the GitHub repository JayRHa/AgentSkills (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 111 tokens to every session and 1,728 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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