Vibe Decision Journal

What it does

When your agent uses it

• Tasks that involve Data cleaning
• Tasks that involve Architecture decision records

Example prompts

• “Use the vibe-decision-journal skill to extract and records architectural decisions from diffs, conversation context, and explicit choices”
• “/vibe-decision-journal”

Workflow steps

5 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

1. 1Read the staged diff
2. 2Analyze for implicit decisions — Look for changes that represent choices
3. 3Filter out non-decisions
4. 4Deduplicate against existing decisions
5. 5Present each extracted decision to the user for review (use the harness's structured question tool if it has one; otherwise ask in plain…

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 8f1d71b. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  Shell commands in SKILL.md call:

  • git

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  No URLs in SKILL.md. Its commands use git, which can reach the network depending on how they are called.

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Vibe Decision Journal loads about 1.4k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 107 tokens; SKILL.md has 511 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~107

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~1.4k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from ash1794/vibe-engineering at commit 8f1d71b, republished under its MIT licence (© ash1794). 511 words, ~1,386 tokens.

name

vibe-decision-journal

description

Extracts and records architectural decisions from diffs, conversation context, and explicit choices. Supports automatic extraction from staged changes, deduplication against prior decisions, and persistent ADR-format logging with spec traceability. Use after a significant design or architecture choice, before committing a diff that embeds implicit decisions, or when the same question keeps resurfacing.

user-invocable

true

## DEC-[NNNN]: [Short title]
**Date**: [Today]
**Status**: Accepted | Superseded | Rejected
**Supersedes**: DEC-[NNNN] (if applicable)

### Context
[1-2 sentences: what situation prompted this decision]

### Decision
[What was decided. Be specific enough to reconstruct the choice.]

### Alternatives Considered
1. [Alternative A] — Rejected because [reason]

### Consequences
- [What this enables or constrains going forward]

### Affected Files
- [path/to/file.ext]

### Spec Sections (if applicable)
- [Which spec sections this decision affects]

{
  "id": "DEC-0001",
  "title": "Use Redis for session caching",
  "status": "accepted",
  "date": "2026-03-07",
  "context": "Need sub-10ms session lookups at 10k req/s",
  "decision": "Use Redis with 24h TTL for session data",
  "alternatives": ["In-memory dict (no persistence)", "DynamoDB (too expensive at scale)"],
  "consequences": ["Adds Redis as infrastructure dependency", "Enables horizontal scaling"],
  "affected_files": ["src/cache.py", "config/redis.yml"],
  "spec_sections": ["## Session Management"],
  "supersedes": null,
  "extracted_from": "diff"
}

© ash1794, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in plugins/vibe-engineering/skills/vibe-decision-journal of ash1794/vibe-engineering.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 8f1d71b