# History — <Project>

```
Status: Current
Owner: <who maintains this>
Last reviewed: <YYYY-MM-DD>
Governs: the narrative of how this project got to where it is
Review trigger: A decision reversed, a direction abandoned, or a rewrite
```

## What this is for

<The story, in prose: what was tried, what was abandoned, and why. A reader
arriving in six months wants to know which walls have already been walked into,
and that is not something a commit log tells them.>

**This is a record of *then*, never a description of *now*.** That distinction is
what makes it safe to leave alone as the project changes — a history document
that gets edited to stay current is not a history, it is a second and competing
description of the present.

If you find yourself updating a sentence here because the code changed, the
sentence belongs somewhere else.

## Decisions and their reasons

<One entry per decision that would otherwise look arbitrary later. The reason
matters more than the decision: "we chose X" ages badly, "we chose X because Y
was true at the time" survives Y stopping being true.>

| When | What was decided | Why, at the time |
| --- | --- | --- |
| <> | <> | <> |

## What was tried and dropped

<The most useful section, and the one most often missing. An approach that was
abandoned for a good reason will be proposed again by somebody who does not know
it was tried — including you, in a year.>

## What this file is not

- **Not the plan.** That is `docs/planning/PROJECT_PLAN.md`.
- **Not the work list.** Open work lives in the tracker as milestones and issues.
- **Not a changelog.** Dated entries go in `docs/history/DEVELOPMENT_LOG.md`.