Logbook captures the context, constraints, alternatives rejected, and trade-offs accepted — the moment the decision happens. Six months later, nobody digs through Slack.
The decision was made in a heated Slack thread at 6pm on a Wednesday. By Monday, the context is gone. Six months later, you're making the same decision again.
Hey, quick q — why are we using Kafka here instead of RabbitMQ? The consumer lag is killing us
I think it was decided before I joined? Something about replay semantics? Not sure tbh
@priya.sharma do you remember? You were in that design review back in Q3
I remember we evaluated both but I can't find the notes. There was a Notion doc somewhere... maybe?
Found a Confluence page from 2024 but it just says 'TBD - see Slack thread' 🙃
does anyone actually remember why we chose this? we're about to make the same decision again for the payments service
3.2 hours lost per incident
Average time spent reconstructing context for a past architectural decision when something breaks.
Same debates, every quarter
Without a record of rejected alternatives, teams relitigate decisions that were already settled with hard-won data.
Onboarding takes 3× longer
New engineers spend their first weeks asking "why does this work this way?" instead of shipping.
"I thought we decided against that"
The most expensive words in engineering. Spoken when someone implements what was explicitly rejected six months ago.
Four structured fields. Written once. Searchable forever. Linked to the PR that implemented it.
so we going with kafka or rabbit for this?
kafka. replay semantics. rabbit doesnt do log replay
ok shipped
Search like grep. Version like Git. Onboard like you have a senior engineer in every chair.
4 results · searched 2,847 decisions in 38ms
ADR-0042: initial draft
a3f9c2e · priya · 11:47 PM
Update: add Kafka rejection rationale
b8d1e4a · alex · Feb 19
Status → Accepted after team vote
c2f7b9d · priya · Feb 20
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