writing-design-docs

Writing design docs

REQUIRED BACKGROUND: the technical-writing skill (read-first, hard rules, truth rules, style).

Overview

A design document is a proposal made discussable. Conclusion first, every non-trivial choice in a Why & What box, costs named next to benefits, and fact separated from proposal.

When to invoke, and not

Invoke for anything that argues for a change or records a design: proposals, RFCs, design docs, specs, migration plans, "should we" documents. Do NOT invoke for recording an already-taken decision (recording-decisions), for procedures (writing-runbooks), or for status reports.

Steering under pressure: a proposal persuades with its numbers and its named costs, and the register rules hold whatever the deadline (the technical-writing rule; "punchy" is not an override). When supplied facts arrive without sources, mark them **[source wanted: ...]** and keep writing (see references/truth.md in the technical-writing skill); never invent a citation and never silently drop the fact.

Skeleton

# Title: what the document does

**Subtitle pinning the scope in one sentence**

|                |                                            |
| -------------- | ------------------------------------------ |
| **Status**     | Draft / Request for comments               |
| **Owner**      | [team or role]                             |
| **Scope**      | [explicit, including what falls outside]   |
| **Related**    | [links to sibling documents]               |
| **Audience**   | [who must read this]                       |

---

## 1. Summary
[The answer immediately. Not the occasion, not the method: the conclusion.]

## 2. [Context / what was analyzed]
## 3. [The analysis, split per question]
## n. Open questions
## n+1. Benefits and costs
[Both. A proposal that lists only benefits reads as a sales pitch.]
## n+2. Residual risks and what not to do
[Only when the design hands work to other teams.]

---

*Closing line: which parts are fact and which are proposal, and where input is wanted.*

Structure rules

• Number chapters and cite them as ch. 7.1. Numbers make feedback addressable: readers can point at one.
• Goals and non-goals both. The non-goals (or "explicitly not changed") section is where scope creep dies in writing. State what stays unchanged.
• Definitions before behavior when a term is ambiguous: pin "responded", "eligible", "stale" before using them.
• A grounding section pins the facts the design rests on: a fact/source table, checked against a named commit. Separate verified facts from what will be built.
• Appendices take letters (Appendix A, B) and hold what would bury the main text: config examples, glossaries, inventories.
• A fact lives in one place. Link to it; never repeat it, not even across documents in the same repo.
• Mark unfinished parts with **[DRAFT - input wanted]** instead of omitting them. Visibly unfinished beats invisibly missing.
• Open questions get owners: a name, a role, or an explicit "to be filled by".
• Residual risks and what NOT to do close the document when the design ships work to others.
• No line budget, but length from repetition or emphasis goes; past roughly 800 lines, split and let the main document link to the parts.

The Why & What box

Every non-trivial choice gets one. It makes a proposal discussable: readers react to the box, not to the conclusion.

> **Why & What - [the choice in four words]**
>
> **What:** [the choice, one sentence, no justification]
>
> **Why:** [the reasoning. Also name what the choice does NOT solve.]
>
> **Alternatives considered:**
> - *[Alternative]:* [its strongest argument, and why it still lost]
>
> **Fallback:** [what survives if this does not work]

Rules for the box:

• An alternative dismissed without its strongest argument is a strawman. Name that argument.
• Admitting what the choice does not solve makes the document more credible.
• No box for choices nobody would contest; that is noise.
• An alternative that appears nowhere else in the document does not belong in the box: such a rejection records what the writer once thought, while the reader would never consider the option. One such rejection can be justified; several short ones in a row mean the box is padded.

Tone

• The document stays a proposal: "we propose" and "whether that convinces is up to you", not "this becomes the way of working". It sets the direction and leaves the detailed choices open.
• Name what it costs. The benefits chapter ends with the price: what gets harder, what people must unlearn, which freedom disappears.
• No superlatives, no promise language. Concrete figures and verifiable statements.
• The expected outcome may be negative, and saying so up front is honest writing: "the expected outcome is that the current queue beats the proposed rewrite; that is a useful result."

Completeness check

Before handing a spec or plan to a reviewer or executor, check the five vagueness defects:

1. Unresolved placeholders: any literal TBD, TODO, "fill in later", or clearly incomplete sentence (a marked **[DRAFT - input wanted]** block is deliberate; an unmarked gap is a defect).
2. Missing acceptance criteria: a requirement with no concrete, independently testable success condition.
3. Undefined references: a type, endpoint, component, or table mentioned but defined nowhere.
4. No verifiable output: a task producing nothing a reviewer could inspect (no file path, no command, no observable behavior).
5. What without how: an outcome with no implementable direction ("handle errors appropriately" with no definition of appropriate).

For execution plans, add per task: goal, exact files, the change shown, tests with concrete scenarios, and the verify command. Explain any confusing leftover (an odd directory name, a legacy alias) rather than leaving it puzzling.