Date: 2026-07-04

Status

Accepted

Intent and Scope

This Architecture Decision Record establishes the project's philosophy for making design and implementation decisions with future contributors in mind.

Every meaningful change should leave the project easier to understand, easier to maintain, or easier to extend for the next person who works on it—even if that person is the original author months or years later.

Context

The bootstrap engine is intentionally documentation-first and architecture-led.

Previous ADRs establish that the project values:

• explicit intent;
• stable public interfaces;
• deterministic behavior;
• composition over special cases;
• human-centered diagnostics;
• documentation as part of the product;
• explicit architectural decisions.

These principles all reduce the effort required to understand the project.

A sustainable project should assume that future contributors will not possess the context, memory, or assumptions of today's contributors.

Decision

The project shall optimize for the next contributor.

When evaluating competing designs, preference should generally be given to the approach that:

• is easier to understand without historical context;
• reduces unnecessary cognitive load;
• makes architectural intent more obvious;
• preserves consistency with existing concepts;
• improves documentation alongside implementation.

Contributor convenience should be considered an architectural concern rather than merely a documentation concern.

Rationale

Time is the greatest source of complexity.

Even a solo-maintained project eventually has multiple contributors across time, as the same person returns after weeks, months, or years.

Designs that depend upon memory, unwritten conventions, or implicit knowledge become progressively more difficult to maintain.

Optimizing for future contributors preserves architectural continuity and reduces the cost of long-term ownership.

Alternatives Considered

Optimize Only for the Current Implementation

The project could prioritize the quickest implementation regardless of its long-term readability.

This was rejected because short-term convenience often creates long-term maintenance costs.

Assume Architectural Knowledge

The project could expect contributors to reconstruct design intent from source code and commit history.

This was rejected because architecture should be discoverable rather than inferred.

Consequences

Contributors should consider maintainability as part of correctness.

Documentation, examples, ADRs, and code organization should work together to reduce onboarding effort.

Architectural reviews should ask whether a proposal makes the project easier or harder for the next contributor to understand.

Non-Goals

This ADR does not require optimizing for every conceivable preference or coding style.

It does not discourage efficient implementations.

It does encourage choosing solutions whose reasoning remains clear over time.

Future Considerations

As the project grows, contributor guides, architecture overviews, and development workflows should continue to reinforce the principles established throughout the ADR collection.

The project should remain welcoming to occasional contributors as well as long-term maintainers.

Summary

The bootstrap engine should be designed for longevity.

Every architectural decision should help the next contributor understand not only how the project works, but why it works that way, preserving clarity and continuity across time.