The decisions book
These are decision records: what was decided, what was rejected, what it costs. greenline harvests them into the book at the close of every initiative, and the next initiative reads it before it shapes anything. This is our own book, kept the way yours would be, published with its history. The current policy below supersedes conflicting earlier rulings; their original text and permanent links remain available.
Current policy, from ADR 0038 and the move of guidance to garden on 2026-09-26: installed skills and local diagnostics work offline. Guidance is garden's, a separate product reached only through an optional connector the repository's owner enables. The repository retains its decisions and delivery receipts. garden receives guidance queries, not repository code or policy. Supersedes GD-01's offline-only architecture and GD-02's all-Markdown storage claim: records use Markdown and JSON. Source trees remain preserved, while recorded bookends, reference normalization and approved patches compose installed methods, superseding GD-03's bookends-only limit. A request and its standing grant carry authorized stages through completion; consequential open choices return to the operator. This supersedes GD-04's separate stage approvals and GD-10's compulsory second confirmation. The current setup and the optional connector
One command, offline, idempotent. Nothing leaves the machine; there is no account and no telemetry. Rejected: a hosted service. A tool about durable local files cannot require someone else's server.
Everything is Markdown a person can open and read raw. The files are the state; Git is the history. Rejected: a database or daemon holding project state. Accepted cost: contracts are checked after the fact by the doctor, not enforced at write time.
Vendored skills are preserved byte-identically from their pinned upstreams and keep their authors' voice. greenline adds bookends around a method, never edits inside it. Rejected: forking the methods to taste. The craft is the authors'; the system is ours.
The spec is a gate. An initiative advances to specified only on the operator's explicit word, and close works the same way. Rejected: agent self-approval. An agent that can approve its own contract will.
Review runs in a different session against the committed range, never the session that built it. Reviews record what they saw and are never rewritten afterward. Rejected: self-review. Accepted cost: review costs a second session.
One worktree builds one ticket at a time. A claim is exclusive while the ticket is claimed or implementing. Rejected: parallel claims in one worktree. Accepted cost: parking a ticket takes a released claim and a note.
Raw evidence lives beside the work it proves, instrument beside output, and the instrument settles before the recorded runs. A stranger can re-take the numbers from the repo alone. Rejected: a global evidence directory. Evidence that drifts from its ticket stops being evidence.
Every refusal teaches. A doctor message names the legal fields, the expected home, or the exact cure, inline, at the moment of refusal. Rejected: bare error codes that send you to the docs. The cheapest reliable teacher is the refusal itself.
Closing an initiative harvests the rulings that outlive it into the decisions book, each entry pinned to its source. A close that skips the harvest is warned about, by name. Rejected: letting settled ground live in chat history, where the next session can't read it.
A preference about how the agent works meets the discipline that owns that ground before it's persisted: one pushback naming the rule and its reason, then your second word is final and is recorded. Rejected: silently saving preferences. A preference that bypasses its discipline erodes it invisibly.
Before v1 there is no backwards compatibility. Shapes are what they are; nothing carries upgrade paths for artifacts that no longer exist. Rejected: compatibility code in a product that hasn't shipped its first version. Accepted cost: early adopters re-run init.
Warnings that persist get fixed. A workspace that is always yellow trains everyone to stop reading the doctor at all. Rejected: accumulating tolerated warnings as ambient noise.
The book grows at every close. The harvest that puts a ruling here is the last stage of the pipeline.