Precedentdocs

Getting started

From an empty workspace to a decision your team can cite, in about ten minutes.

1. Create a workspace

  1. Sign in with Google or a magic link. There is no password to set.
  2. Name your workspace. The name gives you a reference prefix, so Acme Robotics numbers its decisions AR-001, AR-002, and so on.
  3. Invite your team under Settings, Users. Admins change settings, members own and draft decisions, viewers read. The free plan covers five seats, counting invitations nobody has accepted yet; see Plans and billing.

2. Add nodes

A node is a place decisions live: a domain (Infrastructure), a project (the mobile app rewrite), or a team. Every decision links to at least one node, which is how someone planning work in that area finds what constrains them. Start with your three or four biggest domains; add projects as they come up.

A node can be restricted to named members. Decisions on a restricted node are invisible to everyone else, in every list, search, and agent tool.

3. Record your first decision

A decision is not a meeting note. It records five things:

  1. Title, one sentence stating what was decided. Write it the way someone would search for it.
  2. Summary and rationale, why this won.
  3. Alternatives, what lost and why. This is the part future arguments are settled with.
  4. Owner, the person who answers for it.
  5. Review trigger, a date or a condition (“when we pass 100 paying customers”). When it fires, the owner gets a review in their inbox.

A new decision is a draft until its owner confirms it. Confirmation is deliberate and only happens in the web app, so agents and integrations can propose but never decide.

4. Let the record come to you

The inbox collects everything that needs a person: drafts awaiting confirmation, reviews whose date arrived, conditions that were met. A weekly digest email summarises open items per member, and each node’s linked Slack channel gets a weekly digest of that node’s open items. From here, most decisions arrive on their own:

  1. Capture from Slack or Teams: a thread becomes a draft with the discussion attached as evidence.
  2. Agents over MCP: your AI tools search the record before acting and propose drafts when you decide something.
  3. Ask AI: ask “why did we pick Postgres” and get an answer that cites the decisions it came from.

Self-hosting

Precedent is a Next.js app on Postgres. The whole stack runs locally with one command, seed data included:

git clone https://github.com/gordonbyron/precedent
cd precedent
docker compose up --build

The README covers production deployment on Vercel and Supabase, every environment variable, and the one-off database grants. Email [email protected] if you get stuck.