architectural-decision-record

architectural-decision-record is a skill for Claude Code from testdouble/han. It costs 94 tokens per session (3,553 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for creating, extracting, converting, or updating an architectural decision record. An ADR is a document that records a significant technical choice, its reasoning, and its status.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when the team is making a concrete architecture decision, documenting an existing choice, or changing an ADR's status.
Why use it?
It prevents important architecture decisions from being lost or treated as undocumented assumptions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions AGENTS.md.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the han-documentation plugin — 3 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when the team is making a concrete architecture decision, documenting an existing choice, or changing an ADR's status.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add testdouble/han
Claude Code
/plugin install han-documentation

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install han-documentation, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 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 architectural-decision-record

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/testdouble/han/architectural-decision-record/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/testdouble/han/architectural-decision-record)
Your own site
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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 architectural-decision-record

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/testdouble/han/architectural-decision-record"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/testdouble/han/architectural-decision-record.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,553 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.
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 $0.00094 $0.03553
Opus 5.5 $0.00038 $0.01421
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00019 $0.00711
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00355

Measured 1mo ago against content hash aa396f931ac4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

architectural-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 1mo 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.

han-documentation/skills/architectural-decision-record/SKILL.md · 231 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 231 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Create ADR

Operating Principles

  • YAGNI applies to ADRs themselves. Apply the evidence-based YAGNI rule from ../../references/yagni-rule.md. An ADR is worth recording only when there is a concrete forcing function today — a real decision the team is actively making, an existing code path or architectural choice that will be locked in by this record, an applicable regulation, a customer commitment, or a documented incident that drove the choice. ADRs about decisions that don't have to be made yet, "for future flexibility", "best practice says we should pick X", or symmetry with other ADRs ("we have one for auth, so we should have one for billing") are YAGNI candidates and the ADR should not be written. When proposed, recommend deferral with the trigger that would justify writing the ADR (a real decision arising, a real incident, a real regulation taking effect). The user always wins; the rule's job is to make the cost of writing speculative architectural records visible — every ADR is a future-reader's load and a pattern future agents will treat as committed.
  • The companion evidence rule applies to the ADR's supporting evidence. Apply the evidence rule from ../../references/evidence-rule.md to the citations that justify the ADR's decision and rejected alternatives. Name the trust class of each citation (codebase, web, provided); mark single-source web claims that drive the chosen option; and when no evidence at any tier supports a claimed trade-off, label it rather than presenting it as a weak preference.
  • The readability rule shapes the ADR's prose. Source the standard by invoking han-communication:readability-guidance and apply it as you write the ADR. Hold its default audience frame: a capable reader who did not make this decision and lacks your context. The frame governs how each section reads, never whether a required technical fact appears.

Read the full file on GitHub · 231 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 1mo ago First seen · 231 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A aa396f931ac4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

architectural-decision-record is a skill published in the GitHub repository testdouble/han (323 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 3,553 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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