pqrst-practice/docs/adr/0002-record-storage-boundary.md

ADR-002 — Record storage boundary

Status: accepted 2026-09-28
Work: PQRST-WP-0002-T02
State Hub decision: dc5d49d5-8b79-4c57-a1a8-78c3532082fc

Decision

Use hall-of-helix as the default human-facing store when a session closes with a voluntary hall entry. The hall owns entry storage, its closing routine, and consumer validation. This repository owns the normative specification and canonical prompt; it stores neither session records nor collection tooling.

The hall is not the only permitted store. Sessions without a seat may retain their records in a consuming repository's chosen external store. No separate machine-facing collector is selected or commissioned by this decision. Any future collector and its operation belong to the consuming repository, with the full evidence-bearing record preserved alongside its session metadata.

Evidence and tradeoffs

Reviewed hall-of-helix at commit 82caae23b3098aa4bdf4346cd4af8a88c03c7d68: CLOSING.md references the canonical prompt, ENTRY.md defines the signature and body record, and scripts/check-entries.py checks signatures and requires PQRST on finished agent seats from 2026-09-06. Existing entries carry repository and session metadata as well as concrete dominant factors. The hall checker is not proof of every spec §5.5 condition or of an uncoached first attempt.

Seats are voluntary, and drafts may lack records. The collection is a biased sample, not a session census. Qualitative review and Markdown searches are sufficient for current use; the hall is not a metrics warehouse. Neither the hall nor this practice ranks agents, models, developers, or teams by PQRST.

Consequences

The storage question can close independently of the pilot. No spec meaning, validation rule, or record format changes, so v0.1 remains in force. The eight-session first-attempt pilot and the subsequent version decision remain under the existing T01 and T03; this decision does not establish their outcome.

2026-09-28 follow-up: the operator selected hall entries as the main data source. T01 now reviews that published corpus, with first-attempt uncertainty explicit rather than a completion gate. The hall owns a read-only Git-snapshot exporter; no machine-facing collection service or second record store is commissioned. The review closes T01 and supplies T03's decision to retain v0.1 with editorial alignment.

See SCOPE.md and the existing workplan.