Add decision gate constraints and review checklist#5
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Add 5 inhibition-based constraints to the decision workflow: - Do not document before understanding the real problem - Do not accept the first option — compare 2+ viable alternatives - Do not list unverified pros/cons — base claims on evidence - Do not write "better"/"faster" without measurable criteria - Do not proceed without naming the accepted tradeoff Applied to: commands/decide.md, skills/decide/SKILL.md, tools/codex, tools/cursor, tools/copilot, tools/windsurf, tools/system-prompts
Inhibition-based checklist for reviewing AgDRs in pull requests with 3 adversarial review questions.
atlas-apex
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Thanks so much for this — really appreciate the thought you put in, and it's clear you read the existing spec carefully before writing. The five decision-gate constraints are a meaningful hardening of the softer "Tips for Writing Good AgDRs" guidance in the template, and the agdr-review.md checklist fills a genuine gap I hadn't filled yet. The three adversarial questions in particular ("what would make this decision wrong?") are excellent — that inversion catches the kind of pro/con blindspot the current template makes too easy.
I'd love to merge this. Two small things before I do, and one note I'll leave for later:
Please add:
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CHANGELOG.md entry under an "Unreleased" heading noting the addition of the decision-gate constraints + review checklist. The repo maintains a CHANGELOG by hand and this is a user-facing change.
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One sentence about
agdr-template-short.md— ideally in the constraints themselves, or as a clarifying note alongside them. The "≥2 alternatives must be compared" rule is a hardening of what used to be a soft suggestion, so any existing AgDR that compared only one option is now retroactively non-compliant. That's fine for the long template, but the short-template is explicitly designed for simpler decisions; worth saying whether the ≥2 rule applies there or not. Either answer is defensible — I just don't want the ambiguity.
Note for a future PR (not blocking):
The five constraints are duplicated verbatim across 8 integration files (Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, system-prompts, commands/decide, skills/decide, agdr-review itself). That matches the existing pattern in the repo where each integration gets its own copy of the guidance, so I'm not asking you to refactor it here — but the next time we update these constraints we'll need an 8-file sweep. If you want to tackle that extraction in a separate PR I'd be keen to see it.
Otherwise, the PR is in great shape: scope is tight, voice matches the rest of the spec, commit history is clean, and the description has all the sections CONTRIBUTING.md expects. Once the two asks above are in, I'll merge. Thanks again for contributing.
Summary
decision quality before creating an AgDR
Why
I noticed agents often rush through decisions — picking the first option,
listing vague pros/cons like "faster" without numbers, or skipping tradeoffs
entirely. These five constraints act as a gate that must be resolved before
the AgDR workflow proceeds.
What changed
Added a "Decision Gate Constraints" section to all 8 tool configs
(Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, system prompts) with:
Also added
agdr-review.mdwith a checklist and three adversarialquestions for reviewing AgDRs in PRs.
Test plan