What it proves
A small planning tool gets more useful when it helps pull the right old decision back into the current review instead of only recording history.
Planning artifacts
decision-journal-cli keeps old decisions from disappearing into archive by making the reopen signal visible.
This guide exists because planning work often remembers that a decision happened but loses the assumption, owner, and revisit point that would make it reusable later. The repo stays close to that gap.
Why this repo carries the track
A short site-side guide before the proof layer on GitHub.
Why it is in this track
It fits the planning-artifact track because the output is not the log itself. The useful artifact is the shortlist of stale and still-open decisions that should shape the next conversation.
What survives the first run
The stale-decision summary is the artifact. It gives a review meeting a better starting point than a long archive dump.
What the first useful success looks like
decision-journal-cli as a first useful success, not only a demo.
The first useful run is a compact view of which decisions are still open, which ones are stale, and who owns them. That is enough to make the next review materially sharper.
Use this before roadmap reviews, quarterly planning, or any working session where old calls keep resurfacing because the original assumptions and revisit dates were never kept visible enough.
python3 decision_journal.py sample_decisions.jsonl --today 2026-04-11Total decisions: 3
Open decisions: 2
Closed decisions: 1
Stale decisions: 1
By owner:
- Mickey: 1
- Winston: 2
Stale decisions:
- Consolidate weekly customer notes into a single repo (Winston)Where it routes next
Keeps a decision log from turning into archaeology by making owner, assumption, and revisit date stay visible.