Record Finding Decision

Record a Finding Decision

A finding no verification ever ruled on stays open forever — the status has no other verdict for it, however deliberately the maintainer decided to live with it. The decision is real, it is just homeless: it was taken between runs, and the only artifacts that could carry it are past evidence that must never be rewritten. This skill gives it a committed home of its own, next to the reports and never inside them.

The ledger

Path: /.odd/decisions.md, committed. Created on first decision with this exact skeleton:

# ODD finding decisions

Decisions the maintainer took on findings recorded in
`.odd/observe-run-reports/` — the committed memory that lets
`/odd-status` stop rendering a declined finding as open. Rows are
appended, never rewritten; a later row for the same finding supersedes
the earlier one. Reports themselves are never edited — this ledger is
the only place a decision lives.

| Date | Finding | Verdict | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|

One row per decision:

| 2026-08-28 | 2026-08-26-1003-config-set-env-preservation.md / F4 | wontfix | Port-move is rare; ~14.5 s accepted |

• Date — the decision's UTC date, YYYY-MM-DD.
• Finding — / . The exact filename disambiguates

finding IDs, which are report-local (two reports can both have an "F4").

• Verdict — wontfix today; the column is free-form so later verdicts

(e.g. accepted-by-design) need no format change.

• Rationale — one sentence, required. No secrets.

Recording a decision

1. Resolve the finding to report filename + finding ID — the row's

Finding value is only as good as this step. When the caller names the report, open it and confirm its ranked-findings table carries that ID; when it does not, say so and stop — a row pointing at a finding that does not exist is worse than no row. When the caller gives only an ID ("wontfix F4"), list .odd/observe-run-reports/ and find which reports' ranked-findings tables carry it, reading bodies only for candidates whose frontmatter matches any service, stack, or environment the caller named — the frontmatter is what keeps this from becoming a full-corpus read. More than one match is a question, never a guess: list the matching filenames with the finding's title from each and ask which one.

1. Require a rationale. A decision without one is not recordable:

the ledger's whole value is that a future reader learns why a finding stopped counting as open, and "wontfix" alone teaches nothing. Ask for the sentence; do not invent one from the report's own prose.

1. Append the row. Create the file with the skeleton above when it

is absent (create .odd/ too if needed), then append one row — today's UTC date, the resolved / , the verdict, the rationale on one line. Never reflow or re-sort the existing rows.

1. A reversal is a new row, with the verdict open — the one

verdict the status recognizes as reopening — and its own rationale; never delete or rewrite the superseded row. The latest row for a finding wins, and the history of the decision stays readable, exactly like the reports this ledger complements.

Rules

• Never modify or delete a report. .odd/ reports are append-only

evidence; this skill writes decisions.md and nothing else. A decision that "should be in the report" is still a ledger row.

• Never write secrets into a rationale — no tokens, credentials,

cookies, or connection strings. The file is made to be committed and shared; refer to access material by variable or secret name only.

• After writing, commit the ledger file on its own:

git add .odd/decisions.md then git commit -m "docs(odd): finding decision " — never stage anything else; a dirty working tree stays untouched otherwise. If committing is impossible (not a git repository, or the caller said not to), state the path and leave the commit to the caller.

• Either way, state the ledger path and the appended row in the reply.

Source & license

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

• Author: using-system
• Source: using-system/oddyssey
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://github.com/using-system/oddyssey#readme

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