Every platform decision the lab made under real constraints, captured in a format that makes the reasoning visible — and revisitable when the constraints change.
An Architecture Decision Record captures the alternatives that were considered, the constraints that ruled some of them out, and the consequences the choice triggered. The format is Michael Nygard's. The point isn't ceremony — it's that platform decisions made implicitly become permanent without anyone deciding they should be. Writing them down keeps the reasoning replayable when the constraints change.
Start with one: ADR-0006 · the governance split is the central architectural decision of The Forge. It explains why the platform is built the way it is.
Listed so the trail is honest about what is documented and what is not. Each is a decision the platform has either made informally or is about to make.
The thermal envelope and unified-memory roadmap that made the cluster viable on a shelf, not in a rack.
GitOps operator selection — why ArgoCD won for a single-cluster platform with promotion semantics.
Structural policy first, intent governance second. Why admission control is a prerequisite, not a competitor, to ClawLaw.
ISR sequencing — why traces, metrics, and logs land on the cluster before any GitOps workload does.
Tier separation — what the control plane owns and what the boundary owns when they share a policy store.
Why the model lifecycle uses K8s primitives instead of a managed MLOps platform — and where the limits of that choice are.