# Deciduous: Decision Tracking, Analysis, and Connections for Anything
Deciduous is, at its core, a piece of open source software.
This software provides a simple layer: a means to store a decision tree from _any_ type of input.
Deciduous can track your changes or discussions, why they happened, what was linked to what decision, the confidence in those decisions, and more.
To do this, it utilizes a directed acyclic graph system.
The software itself is agnostic plumbing.
It could be plugged into anything, be it a slack channel, an outlook inbox, a code repository, or a simple pile of documents.
Deciduous can be many things.
Currently, it is deployed at many companies being used as a software development aid.
These include PepsiCo, the hedge fund X^n, and a multitude of other startups as well as open source projects.
It has been praised by some of the most prominent developers in the JavaScript, Rust, and other programming language ecosystems.
Programmers love it.
But it can go further.
The best proof of this is Deciduous itself. We used Deciduous to build Deciduous. The project's own decision graph contains over 1,100 nodes tracking every goal, every design pivot, every rejected approach, and every outcome across the entire development history. When we reconsidered a traversal strategy that was using too much memory, that pivot is in the graph. When we chose to split our glob matching code into its own reusable crate, the reasoning is in the graph. When we abandoned one approach to terminal coloring and started over, the _why_ is preserved. Six months later, any of those decisions can be queried in plain English through the conversational interface.
That's the insight: the graph doesn't care what kind of decisions it's storing. Code architecture, product strategy, hiring rationale, deal terms -- the structure is the same. Goals lead to options. Options lead to decisions. Decisions lead to actions. Actions produce outcomes. Sometimes, outcomes reveal that a decision was wrong, and you revisit.
Let's take a look at a few use cases that Deciduous could enable for businesses, specifically at the C suite and general executive level.
Each of these premises could have a shell built over the core plumbing Deciduous offers, and be of great use to many business use cases.
The depth of knowledge it captures is only limited to how tightly it can be integrated, and it's so agnostic as to what information it receives that it can fit just about anywhere.
---
## Deciduous for Writing and Product Strategy
### Writing PRDs
Product requirements documents are decision artifacts. They represent a series of choices about what to build, who it's for, and what tradeoffs to accept. Currently, PRDs are written as flat documents. The reasoning that shaped them -- the alternatives considered, the constraints weighed, the stakeholder conversations that influenced scope -- lives in people's heads and scattered Slack threads.
With Deciduous, a PRD becomes a living graph. Each requirement traces back to the goal it serves, the options that were considered, and the decision that was made. When a requirement changes (and they always change), the graph captures the revisit: what new information surfaced, what was reconsidered, and how the new requirement connects to the old one. The PRD stops being a snapshot and becomes a queryable history.
### Planning and tracking product decisions
Product managers make dozens of decisions a week. Most of them are never recorded. The ones that are get buried in meeting notes or Confluence pages that no one reads again. When a decision gets questioned six months later -- "why did we build it this way?" -- the answer is usually "I think Sarah decided that, but she left the company."
Deciduous captures decisions at the moment they're made, with confidence levels, linked context, and connections to the goals they serve. The conversational Q&A interface means anyone can ask "why did we choose vendor X over vendor Y for payments?" and get an answer grounded in the actual reasoning, not a reconstruction from memory.
### Analyzing when decisions are revisited or changed
The revisit node is one of the most powerful concepts in the system. When an approach is abandoned and replaced, the graph captures exactly what happened:
```
[Old Decision] --> [Observation: why it failed] --> [REVISIT] --> [New Decision]
```
For product leaders, this is gold. You can see patterns: which types of decisions get revisited most often? Which teams reverse course frequently, and why? Is it because initial requirements were unclear, or because the market shifted? The graph makes the decision-making process itself visible and analyzable.
### Managing coherent narratives
A company tells stories -- to investors, to the board, to customers, to itself. These narratives need to be coherent over time. When the strategy shifts, the narrative needs to shift with it, and everyone needs to understand what changed and why.
Deciduous tracks narratives as a first-class concept. It can map how a strategic narrative evolved, where the pivots were, and how the current story connects to the history. This is the difference between "we're pivoting to enterprise" as a directive and understanding the chain of observations, outcomes, and revisits that led to that conclusion.
### Assistance in exploring new ideas
When exploring a new product direction or market, the early-stage thinking is the most valuable and the most ephemeral. Brainstorming sessions, research findings, competitive analysis -- all of it feeds into decisions, but the connective tissue is lost.
Deciduous gives exploratory thinking structure without killing it. Log observations as they come. Connect them to goals when the connections emerge. Track which ideas led to which investigations. When the exploration phase ends and it's time to commit, the full reasoning trail is there for anyone who needs to understand how the team arrived at its conclusion.
---
## Deciduous for Corporate Decision-Making and Analysis
### Track every conversation, every meeting, every outcome
Organizations leak institutional knowledge constantly. Meetings happen, decisions are made, and the only record is a set of action items in someone's notebook. The context -- who pushed back, what alternatives were raised, what data was cited -- evaporates.
Deciduous can ingest meeting outcomes as nodes in the graph. Each meeting produces goals, options, decisions, and action items that link to the broader organizational decision tree. The meeting itself becomes a waypoint in a longer story, not an isolated event. When the next meeting revisits a topic from three months ago, the full context is one query away.
### Inquire about them using the conversational interface
The Q&A interface is what makes the graph accessible to non-technical users. You don't need to understand DAGs or traverse nodes. You ask: "What did we decide about the APAC expansion timeline?" or "What were the concerns raised about the vendor contract?" and get an answer drawn from the actual decision record.
This is fundamentally different from searching documents. Document search finds text. The Q&A interface understands relationships -- it knows that a decision was connected to specific observations, that it superseded a previous approach, that it was revisited after a particular outcome.
### Centralize and resolve decision making across teams
Large organizations make contradictory decisions constantly. Engineering decides to deprecate an internal API while product is planning a feature that depends on it. Sales commits to a timeline that operations can't support. These conflicts persist because there's no shared view of what has been decided and why.
A shared Deciduous graph across teams makes decision conflicts visible. When team A's goal contradicts team B's decision, the graph shows it. The multi-user sync system -- designed for distributed teams working asynchronously -- means decisions flow between groups without requiring everyone to be in the same room or on the same call.
### Paper trails for when things become silly
Every organization eventually needs to answer: "How did we get here?" Whether it's a regulatory inquiry, a post-mortem after a failed initiative, or a board member asking hard questions about a strategic pivot, the ability to reconstruct the decision chain is invaluable.
Deciduous provides this by default. Every node has a timestamp, a confidence level, and connections to the decisions that preceded and followed it. Nodes can have documents attached -- the email, the spec, the screenshot, the contract. The graph is the paper trail, and it was built in real-time, not reconstructed after the fact when memories have already faded and people have already started covering their tracks.
---
## Deciduous for Personal Communications Reference
### Understand the pulse of the discussions in your slack rooms
Executives drown in communication. Slack channels, email threads, meeting recaps -- the volume makes it impossible to maintain a true picture of what's happening across the organization. Important signals get buried in noise.
Deciduous, plugged into communication channels, can surface the decisions being made (or avoided) across the organization. Not as a surveillance tool, but as a sense-making layer. What are the recurring themes? Where are teams stuck? What decisions keep getting relitigated without resolution? The graph reveals patterns that no amount of reading Slack messages can surface.
### Make better informed decisions based on truly following what is going on
The difference between a well-informed executive and a poorly-informed one is rarely about access to information. It's about _connected_ information. Knowing that the engineering team is behind schedule is one data point. Knowing that they're behind because they revisited their architecture after discovering a performance issue that was first flagged by a customer three months ago -- that's connected information.
Deciduous connects information by design. Every node exists in relationship to other nodes. The graph grows as the organization makes decisions, and querying it produces answers with context, not isolated facts.
### Know yourself better and figure out where the weak points are
Personal decision analysis is an underexplored category. Deciduous can track an individual's decision-making patterns over time. Which decisions did you make with high confidence that turned out wrong? Which low-confidence decisions succeeded? Where do you consistently underestimate complexity? Where do you revisit decisions most often?
This isn't journaling. It's structured self-analysis backed by a queryable data model. For executives whose decisions have outsized impact, understanding their own decision-making patterns is a meaningful competitive advantage.
---
## Revenue Potential
### Market
The target market is threefold:
1. **Developer tools** (current beachhead): Individual developers and teams using AI-assisted development. This market validates the technology and generates word-of-mouth. It's where Deciduous has traction today.
2. **Enterprise decision infrastructure**: Companies with 100+ employees where decision-making is distributed, frequently revisited, and poorly documented. This is where the real revenue lives.
3. **Executive tooling**: C-suite and VP-level users who need connected information about what their organization is deciding and why. This is the premium tier.
### Pricing Model
- **Open source core**: The CLI and graph engine remain MIT-licensed. This drives adoption and community.
- **Per-seat SaaS layer**: Hosted graph, Q&A interface, integrations (Slack, email, calendar, document stores). Minimum $200/month/seat, with the expectation that enterprise seats command significantly more.
- **Annual platform fee**: Minimum $5,000/year for the hosted platform, scaling with usage and integration depth.
- **Enterprise contracts**: Custom pricing only. Target companies growing fast enough that decision-making is actively breaking down -- that's when the pain is sharpest and the willingness to pay is highest.
### Why the pricing works
Deciduous requires Claude Pro or Max for its AI features. Users are already paying for AI. Deciduous is the layer that makes that AI investment accumulate value over time instead of resetting every session. The cost of Deciduous is marginal compared to the cost of lost institutional knowledge, revisited decisions, and organizational confusion.
### Growth dynamics
The graph gets more valuable as more people use it. One person's decision graph is useful. A team's decision graph is powerful. An organization's decision graph is a strategic asset. This creates natural expansion pressure within accounts -- once one team sees the value, adjacent teams want in.
### Where the money comes from
The money isn't in the software. The software is the wedge. The money is in becoming the system of record for organizational decision-making. Today, that role doesn't exist -- decisions live in people's heads, in Slack, in docs that nobody reads. The company that captures and structures that information is building something with deep switching costs and compounding value.
---
## What Exists Today
Deciduous is not a slide deck. It's shipping software, version 0.13.6, written in Rust, available on every major platform. It has:
- A CLI that manages the full decision graph lifecycle
- A web viewer with five visualization modes (chains, timeline, force-directed graph, DAG, archaeology)
- A conversational Q&A interface backed by Claude
- Multi-user sync via patch files
- Document attachments with AI-generated descriptions
- GitHub Pages deployment for sharing graphs publicly
- Integration with Claude Code, OpenCode, and Windsurf AI assistants
- Its own decision graph of 1,100+ nodes as a living proof of concept
The foundation is built. What comes next is the shell layer that makes it accessible beyond developers -- the integrations, the hosted platform, and the enterprise features that turn an open source tool into a business.