decision-record

# Decision record A skill for creating structured decision records for design system choices. Covers component decisions, token architecture choices, tooling selections, governance policies, and any other decision worth recording so future contributors do not have to reverse-engineer the reasoning. ## Before you begin: verify references Before doing anything else, confirm that every file listed in this skill's frontmatter `references:` field exists at its relative path from this SKILL.md. If any are missing, stop — the install is incomplete. This usually means a third-party installer (for example `npx skills install`) flattened the skill into a standalone folder and dropped the repo-root `knowledge-notes/` directory this skill depends on. Tell the user to reinstall using a supported method from `1-INSTALL.md` (git clone, or the `.plugin` bundle in Cowork) and to run `verify-install.sh` from the install root to confirm the fix. Only proceed without the references if the user explicitly says to — and if they do, state clearly in your output that it was produced in degraded mode without the pack's reference material. ## Context Design systems accumulate decisions faster than they accumulate documentation. The result is a system where the current state is known but the reasoning is not — which means the same debates recur, constraints get ignored because their origin is forgotten, and new team members spend weeks learning by collision what a thirty-minute conversation would ...