Pattern
Two-way door
You might say: reversible decision, one-way door, Type 1 and Type 2 decisions
Sort decisions by how hard they are to undo. Make the reversible ones quickly and close to the work. Slow down, and bring in more people, only for the few that are costly or impossible to reverse.
- Ask
- If this turns out to be wrong, how costly is it to undo?
Sources
- Jeff Bezos (Amazon), 2015 Letter to Shareholders, 2015 Letter to Shareholders
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible … and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.
- Jeff Bezos (Amazon), 2015 Letter to Shareholders, 2015 Letter to Shareholders
But most decisions aren’t like that … they are changeable, reversible … they’re two-way doors.
- Jeff Bezos (Amazon), 2015 Letter to Shareholders, 2015 Letter to Shareholders
Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
- Kody, kody-hq/kody repository, docs/principles/two-way-doors.md
A two-way door is cheap to reverse. Ship it and change it if it is wrong. A one-way door is expensive to undo
- Kent C. Dodds, You Own the Outcome: Product Engineering in the Age of AI, Then, ask for options instead of an answer
Two-way doors you can walk through quickly and let the agent run. One-way doors (public API names, data shapes, pricing) are where you slow down and think.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Two-way door" (pattern-two-way-door) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/software-factory/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal