Buy Vs Build Adr

Buy vs Build ADR

Capture non-obvious buy-vs-build decisions as Architecture Decision Records so the reasoning — and the trigger to revisit it — survives the pull request.

When to record

Record an ADR when a decision is non-obvious or hard to reverse:

• Adding or removing a dependency.
• Choosing a commercial service over owning a capability.
• Building something in-house.
• Picking one technical option over a comparable one (for example, Server-Sent Events over WebSockets).

Skip it for obvious, trivial, easily reversible choices. An ADR is a few sentences, not an essay — it mirrors the one-line decision note the rule already produces, just durable and reviewable.

How to record

ADRs live in docs/decisions/, numbered sequentially as NNNN-title.md. Use the next free number. Either run the helper:

node scripts/record-decision.js \
  --title "Use Server-Sent Events for the live feed" \
  --rung native-platform \
  --decision "Stream updates with SSE over HTTP." \
  --rejected "WebSockets, because the feed is one-way and full-duplex is unused." \
  --revisit "the feed needs bidirectional messaging."

…or, if no helper is available, create docs/decisions/NNNN-title.md by hand with this shape:

# NNNN. 

- Status: Accepted
- Date: 
- Rung: 

## Context

## Decision

**Tradeoff:** 
**Rejected:**  because 

## Consequences

Revisit if .

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: stdin
• Source: stdin/buy-vs-build
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.