Inquest

An inquest establishes a finding from the record. It calls every witness available, writes down which ones it could not call, and returns a verdict a reader can follow back to the evidence.

Use it for "why is it built this way", "what do we actually know about X", "is this claim supported", "what happened before this broke", or any number that is about to influence a decision.

The code is not a witness to its own intent. It tells you what happens, rarely why it exists, and never what was tried first and abandoned. Reading it harder does not fix that.

The seven categories

Evidence about a decision scatters across systems that have nothing to do with each other. You cannot tell from the question which one holds the answer, so cover all seven:

1. Source control - commits, PR bodies, review threads.
2. Issue tracker - tickets, their comments, what they blocked.
3. Long-form documents - specs, notes, handoffs.
4. Real-time chat - the channel where it was actually argued out.
5. Database and warehouse - what the data says happened.
6. Observability and error tracking - what broke, and when.
7. Product analytics - what users did before and after.