clide/governance/decisions/process.md

Process Decisions

Q&D record system itself, kanban, commit conventions, changelog.

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D-34: Q&D record system

• Date: 2026-04-21
• Decision: Adopt settled-reach's Q&D record convention. Confirmed decisions are D-NNN under decisions/<domain>.md; open questions are Q-NNN under decisions/questions-<domain>.md; rejected alternatives are R-NNN under decisions/rejected.md. Markdown is the source of truth; .pql/pql.db is a query index built from markdown. Record shape and claiming rules live in decisions/README.md.
• Rationale: Two places currently hold clide's architectural knowledge — ADRs and scattered plan files — and neither lets an agent or reviewer locate "the unresolved thing in this subsystem." Q&D fixes that: one index, one shape, one claim rule. Proven in daily use in settled-reach.
• Cost: One more directory to maintain. A learning curve for contributors (tiny: read decisions/README.md).
• Raised by: 2026-04-21 planning.

D-35: Kanban / waterfall, not Scrum

• Date: 2026-04-21
• Decision: Ticketing is kanban + waterfall. Tickets flow backlog → ready → in_progress → review → done → cancelled. No sprints, no velocity, no story points. Settled-reach's Scrum layer (sprints, sprint reviews, sprint close as a sync event) is stripped.
• Rationale: Clide has a solo-or-small-team cadence. Sprint ceremonies add overhead without adding signal at this scale. Kanban matches how the work actually happens.
• Cost: No natural "sprint close" event to sync shared state. See Q-22.
• Raised by: 2026-04-21 planning.

D-36: .claude/ is committed project surface, managed through the IDE

• Date: 2026-04-21
• Decision: .claude/ (hooks, skills, agents, MCP settings) is committed alongside code. Only .claude/settings.local.json is gitignored. The reserved builtin.claude-control extension surfaces .claude/ as a first-class sidebar tab (sub-tabs: Settings / Skills / Agents / Hooks / MCP) in a future tier.
• Rationale: .claude/ is project governance — same status as CLAUDE.md, decisions/, Makefile. Treating it as dotfile-cruft loses project-wide conventions (skills, hooks) that should travel with the repo.
• Cost: Contributors commit Claude Code config alongside code changes. Discipline required; minor.
• Raised by: 2026-04-21 planning. Distinct from the existing builtin.claude stub reserved for Tier 1's "run Claude Code in a PTY pane."

D-37: Commit conventions per git-commit skill

• Date: 2026-04-21
• Decision: Commits follow .claude/skills/git-commit/SKILL.md: imperative subject ≤ 70 chars, no feat:/fix: type prefixes, no emojis, optional body wrapped at ~72 chars, multi-line messages via HEREDOC, attribution trailer Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com> (the model-identifier variant the harness produces is also accepted).
• Rationale: Python-era clide under legacy/ used Conventional Commits; the Flutter rebuild does not. Imperative mood reads better for a project-governance log; types are noise when every commit is scoped to a subsystem already.
• Cost: Contributors with Conventional Commits muscle memory adjust.
• Raised by: 2026-04-21 planning.

D-38: Changelog discipline — Keep a Changelog 1.1.0

• Date: 2026-04-21
• Decision: CHANGELOG.md follows Keep a Changelog 1.1.0. Every user-visible commit adds an entry under ## [Unreleased] in the appropriate subsection (Added / Changed / Deprecated / Removed / Fixed / Security). Cutting a release moves entries under a dated heading and bumps pubspec.yaml version: in the same commit. Pure bookkeeping commits (comment-only, .gitignore tweak, lint config) skip the changelog.
• Rationale: Release notes that have to be written after the fact aren't written. Writing them per commit keeps the log honest.
• Cost: One extra edit per user-visible commit; zero if the change is invisible.
• Raised by: 2026-04-21 planning.

D-39: Planning tooling lives in pql, not clide

• Date: 2026-04-21
• Decision: Planning subcommands (decisions, ticket, plan) land in pql's repo long-term. Clide consumes them via shell-out, matching D-3's wrap-don't-duplicate rule for pql. Clide does not grow Dart subcommands for planning.
• Rationale: A terminal user or a user in VS Code / JetBrains still needs Q&D access. Binding planning tooling to clide-the-Flutter-app would cut them off from their own work — see R-9. pql is already the CLI, already universal, already wrapped by clide.
• Cost: Planning features don't ship until pql catches up. Mitigated by D-40. Gated by Q-21.
• Raised by: 2026-04-21 planning.

D-40: [SUPERSEDED] Python stopgap under tools/scripts/plan

• Date: 2026-04-21
• Decision: A time-limited Python port of settled-reach's decisions_sync.py + ticket + decision scripts lives at tools/scripts/plan with support modules under tools/scripts/planning/. Writes to .pql/pql.db (gitignored). Ticket IDs are T-NNN (TEXT PK, reshape from settled-reach's integers). Same schema, same markdown, same verb shape as the eventual pql subcommands.
• Sunset: Delete the stopgap when pql ships pql decisions sync | validate | list | show | claim | coverage + pql ticket new | list | show | status | assign | block | board with feature parity, and reads the same .pql/pql.db file the stopgap wrote. Removal commit shape: R-11.
• Rationale: Planning tooling must work day one. Pql's Go implementation won't land for at least a cycle or two. Without a stopgap, the convention lives on paper; with one, tickets + decisions are queryable from today. Same schema means migration is call-site find-replace (tools/scripts/plan → pql ), no data migration.
• Cost: Python dep on contributors' machines (already present on most Linux dists). One time-limited tool to maintain. See R-10 for why tools/scripts/plan and not tooling/db/.
• Raised by: 2026-04-21 planning.
• Amendment (2026-04-22): Sunset condition met. pql 1.0.0 ships full feature parity. Stopgap deleted per R-11.

D-67: Pql changelog files are committed alongside code

• Date: 2026-05-11
• Decision: Clide commits .pql/changelog/{tickets,ticket_history,ticket_deps,ticket_labels}/<YYYY-MM>.sql files alongside source changes. pql.db itself stays gitignored — it's the local replay target, rebuildable from changelog + governance/*.md on any clone. Pre-commit hook auto-stages the changelog deltas; post-merge / post-checkout / post-rewrite hooks replay them into pql.db.
• Rationale: Resolves Q-22. The single-file pql-plan.json snapshot model couldn't merge concurrent edits cleanly (every ticket flip rewrote the same JSON). Pql 1.4.x reshaped persistence into append-only per-month SQL files with inline LWW guards, which is option (3) of Q-22 (markdown/SQL mirror, git-legible, DB rebuildable) evolved into a form that merges by default. Clide migrated to it on 2026-05-09 (01a99ed, d162ba2).
• Cost: Each user-visible commit also carries the matching changelog diff. The auto-stage hook handles it. Changelog files grow monotonically across commits even on no-change exports — minor file-size cost, no replay-correctness impact (LWW dedupes on import).
• Resolves: Q-22.
• Cross-references: D-3, D-39.
• Raised by: 2026-05-11; cleanup after pql D-21 / governance/ migration.

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