Keep the why beside the work

Six months into a project, someone asks: why did we choose this approach? The answer lives in a meeting that half the team no longer remembers, a thread that got buried, a trade-off that seemed obvious at the time. So the team reopens the question, rehashes the trade-off, and loses a week to history it already paid for.

Decisions are the most expensive artifacts a team produces—and the most fragile, because their value depends entirely on context that isn’t stored with them.

A decision without its reasoning is just an opinion

When a choice is recorded as a bare outcome—“we’re doing X”—it’s defenseless. The next person to question it has no way to know whether the objection was already considered and rejected, or whether it’s genuinely new. So every decision stays permanently reopenable, and the team pays the coordination tax over and over.

Attach the reasoning and the alternatives, and the decision becomes load-bearing. Someone can read it and either accept it or bring a new objection—one the team hasn’t already weighed. That’s the difference between revisiting and relitigating.

Project memory, not project documentation

The word “documentation” implies a chore: a separate artifact, written after the fact, maintained by nobody. Project memory is different. It’s the living record that sits beside the work—the roadmap that shows what’s now, next, and still taking shape; the decision log that keeps reasoning attached to choices; the wiki that holds the shared vocabulary.

The key is proximity. Memory only works if it’s where the work happens, updated in the same motion as the work itself. The moment it becomes a separate place you have to remember to visit, it’s already dead.

Publish proposals, not raw thoughts

A team doesn’t need to see every half-formed idea—that’s noise. What it needs is a steady signal: here’s a proposal that’s ready for the group, here’s the reasoning, here’s what we decided. Duet’s review queue exists to publish exactly that, and nothing else.

Shared direction is a practice, not a document. The teams that keep it aren’t the ones with the best wikis—they’re the ones where the why never gets separated from the work.