I’ve been discovering recently that ChatGPT is actually pretty good at helping write Architectural Decision Records (ADRs).
Like most writing tasks, I’m finding ChatGPT is good at giving me a nice starting point instead of staring a blank template.
Even with as simple a prompt as “write an architectural decision record on why we chose to go with react instead of angular”, it’ll give a decent list of pros and cons on the topic in a common ADR template. I can also refine it further by saying “write it using the following template instead…”
I really like ADRs for capturing why we made a particular decision and the important points we considered and which things might have been deal breakers - which ChatGPT obviously can’t do for you but it’s a quick way to list out some points and occasionally it’ll even mention something I hadn’t considered.
I also like asking it to argue the reverse like: “write an architectural decision record on why we chose to go with angular instead of react”
Interestingly, it will show the result in the UI as the rendered markdown but when you click the “copy” button it will copy the source markdown which is nice.