Architecture decision records

Every recorded decision, including the retracted ones

Twenty-three records, in numeric order. Each is short and each has a Status: line saying whether it is in force, and — for the interesting ones — what later evidence did to it.

Three are worth reading because they were reversed:

• ADR-0003 — fused: measure, then decide — the whole-loop fused op measured slower than burn and was deleted (superseded by ADR-0009).
• ADR-0012 and ADR-0014 — the sparse-attention arm emitted garbage indices on burn 0.22.0-pre.4 and was cut with its crate.

A record that was reversed is not a record that failed. It is the reason the replacement is not being re-litigated.

• ADR-0001 · BPB at fixed budget is the score — docs/adr/0001-bpb-scorecard.md
• ADR-0002 · A/B or death, ties delete — docs/adr/0002-ab-or-death.md
• ADR-0003 · fused/ fast path: measure, then keep or delete — docs/adr/0003-fused-measure-then-decide.md
• ADR-0004 · Staged context ladder to 1M with a long gate — docs/adr/0004-context-ladder.md
• ADR-0005 · One config seam: resolve, validate, snapshot — docs/adr/0005-config-single-seam.md
• ADR-0006 · Architecture verdicts from the 2026-09-21 survey — docs/adr/0006-research-verdicts.md
• ADR-0007 · The architecture scales with hardware, by commitment — docs/adr/0007-scaling-path.md
• ADR-0008 · Reasoning over recall — docs/adr/0008-reasoning-over-recall.md
• ADR-0009 · Fused rewrite: two rungs, then death — docs/adr/0009-fused-rewrite-rungs.md
• ADR-0010 · Corpus v2: the eval tail never trains — docs/adr/0010-corpus-v2-no-leak.md
• ADR-0011 · Loud failures: no silent data, no silent skips — docs/adr/0011-loud-failures.md
• ADR-0012 · MSA is broken on the pre.4 stack: arm off, kernel rewrite deferred — docs/adr/0012-msa-broken-on-pre4.md
• ADR-0013 · 0013: Fixed depth by default; PonderNet halting deleted — docs/adr/0013-fixed-depth.md
• ADR-0014 · MSA is cut, not deferred (supersedes ADR-0012’s “arm off, rewrite deferred”) — docs/adr/0014-msa-cut.md
• ADR-0015 · 0015: The top-k -> gather primitive works; three mechanisms unblocked — docs/adr/0015-topk-gather.md
• ADR-0016 · The three CUDA-backend precision bugs: two are not bugs, one is upstream, and the gate is the deliverable — docs/adr/0016-cuda-backend-precision-bugs.md
• ADR-0017 · ADR-0017 — dormouse-fused: the technology lives in the library, the model is composition — docs/adr/0017-dormouse-fused.md
• ADR-0018 · ADR-0018 — dormouse-fused is a standalone project, with three hard rules — docs/adr/0018-standalone-fused.md
• ADR-0019 · ADR-0019: no silent fallbacks — docs/adr/0019-no-silent-fallbacks.md
• ADR-0020 · ADR-0020 — Oracle discipline: what “verified” is allowed to mean — docs/adr/0020-oracle-discipline.md
• ADR-0021 · ADR-0021 — A resume is the same run, or it is a hard error — docs/adr/0021-resume-is-the-same-run.md
• ADR-0022 · ADR-0022 — One task per worktree, and the worktree dies with the task — docs/adr/0022-worktree-discipline.md
• ADR-0023 · ADR-0023: the inference export, and which weight format it ships — docs/adr/0023-inference-export.md