ADR-0003 — Decisions that bind others live in docs/adr, not only in the State Hub

Context

This repo recorded decisions with the State Hub's record_decision() and wrote governing content as prose in docs/ — 24 files on 2026-08-17, none carrying a status, owner, revision or review date. It held no ADRs at all.

Two things made that a defect rather than a style.

The hub is a read model. The estate's standing rule is that local files are the source of truth and the hub reflects them. A decision that exists only as a hub record inverts that for the one class of content where it matters most.

policy-nexus publishes canon and ADRs only, globbing docs/adr/*.md from each repo. A repo with no ADRs is invisible to the estate's publication surface no matter how much governing content it holds. This repo owns S3 boundary rules, the credential-lane model and the consumption-mode gate — all binding on other repos, all unpublishable.

The gap was structural, not an oversight: nothing in the session protocol ever told anyone to write an ADR here.

Decision

A decision that binds anyone outside this repo is recorded as an ADR in docs/adr/, with the frontmatter in docs/adr/README.md, before or alongside any hub record. The hub record points at the ADR; it does not replace it.

Runbooks and procedures stay as prose in docs/ and stay unpublished. The test is not importance — several runbooks are critical — but whether the document decides something for someone else.

Consequences

• docs/adr/ exists, with a convention, a template and this repo's first three ADRs.
• Existing prose is not converted wholesale. Content is promoted when it is next touched, or when a consumer needs to cite it.
• last_reviewed and review_interval are mandatory here, which is stricter than the estate norm — of 69 ADRs across 19 repos on 2026-08-17, 21 had YAML frontmatter and 2 had any notion of a review date. POLICY-NEXUS-WP-0001 T05 cannot compute staleness without those fields and must not invent them, since inventing them would make the publication a second source of truth, which is that workplan's own top risk. Routed as RPF-WP-0018 finding F5.
• Session protocol guidance should follow, so the next agent writes an ADR without being told. Not done in this ADR.

Alternatives considered

Keep decisions in the hub and have policy-nexus read it. Rejected on both sides: it would make a read model authoritative, and it would give the publication surface a source that no repo can diff or review.

Add frontmatter to all 24 existing docs/ files. Rejected. Most are runbooks that should not be published, and stamping them with a status would assert a decision that was never made.