What is a brief?

A decision brief is the smallest written artifact that could unblock a stalled engineering ticket. Not an ADR. Not a six-page RFC. Five sections, written in the heat of the work, by the person who has to live with the call.

• The blocker — three bullets on why this ticket is stalled long enough to need a brief in the first place.
• Three options — three real proposals, with the reason each is on the table. No strawmen.
• The memo — two or three paragraphs on why one option wins. The picked option, the rejected options, the constraints.
• The outcome — written ~30 days later. What actually happened, what surprised us, what we'd do differently.
• Reversibility — one-way door or two-way door, in the Bezos sense. It frames how much rigor the brief deserves.

The Library exists because most of this context is normally lost: it lives in a Slack thread that scrolls away, or a doc that nobody links to again. Publishing — anonymized — makes the artifact useful to the next team that hits the same fork.

How are these sourced?

Briefs come from teams running crastinating who opt in to publish, and from a curated set of illustrative briefs we wrote to seed the library — clearly labeled. We never publish a memo without consent. We never publish customer or tenant identifiers, even with consent.

Where does the product fit?

crastinating.pro is the decision queue that produces these artifacts in the first place: it spots a stalled ticket, drafts the smallest memo that could unblock it, and routes it to whoever can decide. The Library is the public face of that output — the same shape, anonymized.