adr-gen reads your Git repository and generates a structured architecture decision record — recovering the why behind your code, so nobody has to guess three years from now.
Free CLI, runs locally, no account required. We'll email you when the hosted version ships.
When Whiteboard launched on Hacker News as an open-source IDE for thoughtful software design, it collected 181 points and 77 comments — a comment-to-point ratio of 0.43, unusually high for a developer tool. Reading through that thread, the same anxiety keeps surfacing: the design happens, the diagram gets drawn, and then six months later nobody remembers why the system looks the way it does. Whiteboard solves the problem of designing software. It does not solve the problem of explaining that design to the engineer who inherits it.
The existing tools for this are not good enough. adr-tools gives you a CLI to write
decision records by hand, but it depends on a discipline almost no team sustains — the records go
stale the moment the sprint gets busy. Confluence and Notion can hold the documents, but at
$8–15 per person per month they are expensive places to store text that nobody updates. Structurizr
asks you to learn an entirely new modeling DSL before you can document anything. Every one of these
tools assumes you already know what the decision was and are willing to type it out. That assumption
is exactly where documentation dies.
The timing is right because the raw material already exists. Every decision your team ever made is
sitting in your git log, your commit messages, your TODO comments, and your module
structure — just never