3 posts tagged with "adr"

Architecture decision records are great, and you should write them. But ADR tooling shares one assumption: that a decision lives in one file and stays there. If your real decisions live across Slack, GitHub, Jira and Confluence and keep changing, you'll eventually want something that fits that reality. Here are the alternatives and how they compare.

If you haven't picked an ADR tool yet, start with ADR tools compared; this piece is about what comes after.

There's no dominant tool for architecture decision records, which is a useful signal in itself: the field is young and most teams are still figuring out what they actually need. This is an honest comparison of the real options, what each is good at, and the problem none of them solve.

If you're new to ADRs, start with the complete guide and come back here when you're picking tooling.

An architecture decision record (ADR) is a short document that captures one significant decision: what you decided, why, what you considered, and what it costs you later. One decision per file. Plain text, in the repo, next to the code it governs.

That's the whole idea. The reason ADRs are having a comeback in 2026 isn't nostalgia. It's that AI coding agents now write a lot of your code, and an agent that can't see why something was built a certain way will happily refactor the reason away.