How one team conquered
Decision Amnesia.

Acme Corp
Globex
Soylent
Initech
Umbrella
Chapter 1

The Ephemeral Chat

It's mid-Q2. The engineering team has been flying blind on a few recent outages. To fix this, the backend lead proposes an aggressive observability push in the Slack channel.

In a normal company, this critical architectural—and financial—decision would be buried in chat history within hours. Months later, people would wonder why costs spiked.

# infrastructure
DK
David (Backend Lead) 10:45 AM
Team, we need better visibility into our latency spikes. I strongly propose we enable Detailed CloudWatch metrics for all our API Gateways and Lambda functions across the board.
RFC: System-Wide Observability via CloudWatch Google Docs • Edited just now
JS
Jessica (SRE) 10:52 AM
I agree. It's going to increase our AWS bill significantly, but the MTTR improvement will be worth it. I've already opened a PR to update the Terraform modules. @David let's merge this today.
feat(tf): enable detailed CloudWatch metrics #1042 GitHub • Opened by jessica-sre
Chapter 2

The Silent Observer

But this team uses Verachi. The Engineering Manager makes the call and simply reacts with a 📌 to confirm the decision.

Verachi doesn't ask anyone to log into a new tool or fill out a Jira ticket. It simply observes the reaction, understands the context, and builds a graph connecting the Slack conversation, the Google Doc, and the GitHub PR.

# infrastructure
CT
Chris (Eng Manager) 11:05 AM
Approved. The visibility trade-off is worth the cost increase. Let's roll it out.
📌 1
🚀 3
Verachi APP 11:06 AM
I've captured this decision and linked the surrounding context.
Decision: Enable system-wide Detailed CloudWatch Metrics
Rationale: Necessary to improve MTTR during latency spikes, acknowledging the trade-off of significantly increased AWS costs.

Related Artifacts:
• 📄 RFC: System-Wide Observability (Google Docs)
• 🐙 PR #1042: enable detailed CloudWatch metrics (GitHub)
Chapter 3

The Ghost of Problems Past

Three months later, the CFO is reviewing the quarterly expenses and notices a massive spike in infrastructure costs. He jumps into the #finance channel looking for answers.

Instead of engineers wasting hours doing "decision archaeology", Verachi instantly auto-replies with the context, the design document, and the code changes.

# finance
MS
Michael (CFO) 2:15 PM
Can someone in engineering explain why our AWS bill went up 40% last month?? Was there a leak? @Chris
Verachi APP 2:16 PM
I found a captured decision that explains this increase.
Related Decision: Enable system-wide Detailed CloudWatch Metrics
Three months ago, the engineering team decided to enable detailed observability metrics across all APIs to improve incident response times. They explicitly noted this would cause an increase in the AWS bill.

See the original context:
• 💬 #infrastructure discussion (Approved by Chris)
• 📄 RFC: System-Wide Observability
• 🐙 PR #1042

The End of Zero Decision Memory

Give your team a cited memory layer for the decisions it keeps revisiting.