Every architecture review, every design document, every engineering disagreement contains implicit tradeoffs. The decision in this chapter is whether to name them.
Making the tradeoff explicit changes the character of the conversation. It moves from “you are wrong” to “you prefer a different tradeoff than I do.” That shift is not just rhetorical — it changes what evidence is relevant, what questions are useful, and what a good resolution looks like. An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) that names the tradeoff is a document that ages well. One that does not is a document that confuses its readers within eighteen months.