0150a5d1ed
Per RFC 0003, Blue-tracked documents live in per-repo .blue/ directories. ADRs needed for semantic adherence checking. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
54 lines
1.3 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
1.3 KiB
Markdown
# ADR 0009: Courage
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| **Status** | Accepted |
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| **Date** | 2026-01-20 |
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---
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## Context
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What do we do when we're afraid?
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## Decision
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**Act rightly, even when afraid.**
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Courage isn't the absence of fear. It's action despite fear.
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In engineering, we fear:
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- Breaking production
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- Deleting code someone might need
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- Challenging senior engineers
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- Admitting we don't understand
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- Shipping before we're certain
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- Changing what has always worked
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- Being wrong in public
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These fears are reasonable. But fear has costs too. Unbroken production that never improves. Code that grows forever. Bad ideas that survive because no one challenged them.
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Courage is acting when action is right, even when fear says wait.
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## What This Means
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- **Delete boldly.** If it's unused, remove it. Git remembers.
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- **Challenge respectfully.** The worst outcome of challenge is being wrong. The worst outcome of silence is bad ideas surviving.
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- **Ship scared.** If you're not a little afraid when you deploy, you're not shipping anything interesting.
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- **Admit ignorance quickly.** "I don't understand" is the beginning of understanding.
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## Consequences
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- 💙 encourages deletion of dead code
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- 💙 surfaces disagreement as useful information
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- 💙 treats shipping as normal, not exceptional
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---
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*"Fear is information. It's not instructions."*
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— Blue
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---
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🧁
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