Preserve Project Decisions — Settled Stays Settled
New sessions love to reopen settled questions. Forensic fidelity carries every decision verbatim — and overriding one requires raising an explicit question first.
Overview
The most expensive failure of session boundaries is decision amnesia: the new chat cheerfully proposes offset pagination after three sessions of settling on cursors. This setup is decision preservation at maximum strength — a design-lock session in Forensic fidelity, where all five recorded decisions travel verbatim, the underlying assumption is first-class, and the handoff instructions add the forensic rule: a decision can be challenged only by raising an explicit question, never silently overridden. Settled stays settled, or the disagreement at least becomes visible.
Workflow
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Capture decisions verbatim
The original wording travels — "cursor-based everywhere, offset rejected" stays exactly that strong.
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Go forensic
Every decision and assumption travels; nothing is capped away.
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Gate the overrides
The forensic rule converts silent reversals into explicit, answerable questions.
Why This Works
- Verbatim decisions resist the softening that paraphrase introduces
- The override gate makes disagreement visible instead of accidental
- Forensic completeness ends the which-decisions-made-the-cut lottery
Best for
- API and architecture design work
- Projects where decision drift caused rework
- Decision-heavy sessions feeding implementation sessions
Not for
- Recording decisions for human stakeholders — that's a summary, the Structured Summary Prompt's world
- Permanent team conventions that outlive the project phase — future Project Context Builder territory
Use cases
- Locking design decisions across implementation sessions
- Stopping the third relitigation of pagination
- Making decision challenges explicit instead of silent