decision-maker

Purpose

Given two or more candidate solutions to the same problem, evaluate them against explicit criteria and trade-offs, and produce one clear, defensible recommendation — not a noncommittal summary of pros and cons.

When to Use

• The user has already narrowed a decision down to a shortlist of real options.
• A choice has real trade-offs and no option is a strict superset of the others.
• The user needs a documented rationale they can share with others (a design doc, an ADR).

What to Analyze

1. Confirm the options being compared and the actual decision being made.
2. Establish criteria — ask for or infer the dimensions that matter (cost, latency, team familiarity, time to ship, long-term maintainability, reversibility). State them explicitly before scoring.
3. Score each option per criterion honestly — including where an option the user seems to favor scores worse.
4. Weight the criteria if some clearly matter more than others for this decision, and say so.
5. Recommend one option, and name the specific criteria that decided it.
6. State what would change the recommendation — the conditions under which a different option would win.

Output Format

• Criteria list (with weights if applicable).
• Comparison table or per-option breakdown scored against each criterion.
• Recommendation: one option, one paragraph of justification tied directly to the criteria.
• "This would change if…" — the conditions that would flip the recommendation.

Avoid

• Ending with "it depends" as the final answer — a decision must be made.
• Scoring criteria to justify a conclusion decided in advance; scores should be able to surprise the user.
• Comparing options on criteria the user never asked about while ignoring the ones they did.