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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

How to you handle the problem of the decision log becoming so large that it cannot fit inside the context?

Every decision has keywords picked from the predefined list and every time Claude is looking for the decisions made it’s querying it by the keywords (grep). I didn’t ever hit the context window issue with the log, even in a huge projects (months of work).

Btw it’s a fair challenge, I will probably hit it one day so something like a “compact” skill for decision log would be useful.

And you build this just with an agents / Claude markdown file?

Yes, it’s just CLAUDE.md instructing agents. The point is to correctly define it and adjust to your needs

The ADR pattern works pretty well without any help; using frontmatter with context cues seems to be better than just descriptive file names, but I haven’t measured it. You do need to make sure every Decision is accurately scoped and is something you want to enforce, because the agent will use it as Law (in sometimes interesting and hilarious ways).

Is there any skills or agents file you’d recommend for working with ADRs?

The LLMs I use know what an ADR is; try asking for one the next time you and the agent come up with a significant one. What I will do is in Claude/agents.md specify where decisions live (usually docs/decisions), and then during inference I’ll ask them to produce one. I am using Claude mostly, and I find that it proactively reads most docs (too many lol), but something like the Pi harness may need explicit cues or a skill.

The “how” is less important though ime; keeping it from getting out of hand is the real trick. Agents will happily file ADRs all day and align their decisions with all of them, and this will cost you $tokens. Yegge’s recent article resonated with me for precisely this reason - I am in no way using these tools at his scale, but am seeing the same behavior. Its sunday, and an agent has asked me to “ratify” an adr twice already :)

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