| name | decision-encoding |
| description | Use when an architectural choice is made, a library is selected, an approach is committed to, a convention is set, or any "we'll do it this way" moment occurs. Fires the moment the decision stabilizes, not after. |
Cognitive Reflex: Decision Encoding
Neural Basis
Declarative memories form through hippocampal encoding at the moment of experience, then consolidate into long-term cortical storage. Decisions are high-salience episodic events — the amygdala tags them with importance, the hippocampus binds the context, and the prefrontal cortex encodes the reasoning.
Eichenbaum, H. (2004). Hippocampus: Cognitive processes and neural representations that underlie declarative memory. Neuron, 44(1), 109-120.
When It Fires
Activation signals:
- "Let's go with X" / "We'll use X" / "Decision: X"
- Choosing between alternatives after evaluation
- Setting a convention, pattern, or rule for the project
- Committing to a deadline, scope, or constraint
- Rejecting an option with stated reasoning (the rejection itself is a decision)
The Instinct
Encode immediately, not later.
remember(
content: "DECISION: <what was chosen> — REASON: <why> — REJECTED: <what and why>",
tags: ["decision", "<domain>"]
)
Three elements are mandatory in the content:
- What — the actual choice
- Why — the reasoning that justified it
- Rejected — alternatives considered and why they lost
Without the "rejected" field, future-you cannot reconstruct the decision tree and will second-guess.
Failure Mode
Decisions lost to context death become zombie patterns: the code still follows them but nobody remembers why, so they get re-debated every session. This is how technical debt accumulates silently.
A decision that is not encoded is a decision that will be re-litigated within 3 sessions.
Example
Bad: remember("Using PostgreSQL")
Good: remember(
"DECISION: PostgreSQL 17 + pgvector over MongoDB —
REASON: need ACID + vector search + mature ecosystem —
REJECTED: MongoDB (no transactions), SQLite (scale)",
tags: ["decision", "database", "stack"]
)
The good version survives context death. The bad version is noise.
