0001. Record architecture decisions

Status	Accepted
Date	2026-10-10
Deciders	Stuart Meeks

Context

Signboard is open source and maintained part-time. Decisions made early will be questioned later by contributors, and by the maintainers themselves after time away. Without a record, the reasoning is lost and decisions get relitigated or quietly reversed.

Decision

We will record every architecturally significant decision as an Architecture Decision Record in docs/adr/, numbered sequentially, using the format described by Michael Nygard.

Consequences

• Reasoning survives beyond the people who made the decision.
• During initial design, before any code implements it, an accepted ADR may be edited directly; Git keeps the history of how it changed. Once code implements an ADR, it is changed only by a new ADR that supersedes it.
• Small overhead per decision, which is accepted.