Make decisions shared, visible, and durable

Any team with more than a couple of people, any project spanning enough time that people forget, and especially distributed, async, or long-lived efforts. The larger and longer, the more it matters.

Coherence (VISION-0001) is a property of shared understanding, and understanding that lives only in one person's head or in a hallway conversation doesn't scale past that moment [S-schell-artofgamedesign]. Decisions get re-litigated, contradicted, or silently forgotten; new members and future-you can't reconstruct why something is the way it is; and the same debates recur. Making decisions visible and durable — written down, findable, with their reasoning — turns the team's accumulated choices into a shared, persistent memory that keeps everyone building the same game. It also enables honest disagreement to resolve rather than recur, because a settled decision is recorded rather than perpetually reopened. (This constitution — and its STATUS.md session tracker — is itself an instance of the principle.)

Record settled decisions and why somewhere findable (a design doc, a decision log, a tracker). Make the reasoning visible, not just the conclusion. Keep it lightweight enough that it's actually maintained. Revisit and update as decisions change — a stale record misleads.

Documentation-heavy (durable, scalable, but risks process bloat and unread docs) vs. lightweight/ conversational (fast, low-overhead, but forgetful and hard to scale). The balance depends on team size, distribution, and project length — more of both as those grow.

Confidence 4.