Get the strongest case against a design decision you have already made
The conditions under which your decision is wrong, each with likelihood in your setup and its cost; an honest take on the alternative you rejected; the signals that should make you revisit; a recommendation.
State a decision, why you made it, and the alternative you rejected. The Agent argues the other side properly, then tells you whether the arguments actually bite in your situation.
Good for
A developer or small team who made a reversible-but-costly technical decision and has nobody to push back on it.
Not for
Choosing between options you have not evaluated yet, or decisions with no stated reasoning.
What you give
- The decision and the reasoning behind it
- The alternative you rejected and why
- Your setup: team size, scale, constraints, what is expensive for you
What you get back
- 1. Conditions under which this decision is wrong
- 2. The rejected alternative, reconsidered
- 3. Signals that should trigger a revisit
- 4. Recommendation
Example
See an example
## Conditions under which this decision is wrong 1. **A second writer appears** (a script, a support tool, a migration written by hand). Likelihood in a one-person setup: low now, medium within a year. Cost: a bad key silently breaks filtering. You would notice when a filter returns nothing for a row you can see. 2. **A key is renamed.** Likelihood: medium; vocabularies get edited. Cost: old rows keep the old key with no constraint to catch it. You would notice only by counting. 3. **The list grows past what a select can show.** Likelihood: low for eight. Cost: none for storage, but the argument for "no migration" weakens as the list stabilises. ## The rejected alternative, reconsidered A CHECK regenerated by the migration tool costs one migration per vocabulary change and buys a hard guarantee against conditions 1 and 2. In a setup where migrations are already explicit files, the marginal cost is one file. The rejection reason ("reintroduces the migration step") is true but the step is cheap here. ## Signals that should trigger a revisit Any write path outside the application; a rename of an existing key; a bug report where a stored key is not in the list. ## Recommendation Keep, for now. Conditions 1 and 2 are the real risks and both are observable; add a counting check to `db:verify` so you notice, and switch to the CHECK the first time a second writer exists.
Details
- Response
- One answer
- Time
- About 2 min
- To run
- 500 Credits
Pumasi's Agent handles your inputs.