# ADR 000013 GitHub Single Source of Truth GitBook **Date:** May 2026\ **Status:** Accepted\ **Decider:** NikiDigitals\ **Version:** GitBook — Thinking Layer *** ## The Principle If it is not in GitHub, it did not happen. This is not a slogan. It is an operational rule that governs every session, every document, and every decision in the LES project. Understanding why requires understanding what happens without it. ## The Problem It Solves A project built with AI assistance faces a specific risk that projects built by traditional means do not. Claude produces documents, reasoning, decisions, and architectural plans within a chat conversation. That conversation is a temporary workspace — it is not version-controlled, not searchable across time, not guaranteed to remain accessible indefinitely, and not visible to anyone who was not in that specific chat. The moment the chat closes, everything in it exists only in that chat's history. For a one-hour session, that is manageable. For a five-year project with hundreds of sessions, thousands of decisions, and dozens of modules, it is catastrophic. A decision made in a chat six months ago cannot be found. An architectural choice cannot be verified. The reasoning behind a design pattern is gone. GitHub solves this completely. Every document committed to GitHub is version-controlled, timestamped, searchable, and permanent. The commit history becomes a chronological record of the entire project — not just what was decided, but when, and in what sequence. ## What This Means in Practice Every session ends with a commit. Not sometimes. Every time. The updated master context document is committed. Any new documents produced are committed. Any decisions recorded in documents are committed. The commit message is clear and descriptive. GitBook is a publishing layer — its content originates in GitHub. The website's content is written as markdown and committed to GitHub before it enters WordPress. LinkedIn articles are drafted and committed before they are published. Everything flows through GitHub first. ## The Commit History as an Artefact There is a secondary benefit that becomes significant over time. The GitHub commit history for the LES project, maintained with discipline across five years, is itself a portfolio piece. It shows a real project, built in real time, by someone who started from zero and progressed systematically to expertise. That is visible, verifiable, and impossible to fake. No CV claim or interview answer carries the same weight as five years of committed work in a public repository. That artefact only exists if the rule is followed without exception. One week of uncommitted work breaks the chain. The rule is the chain. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://nikidigitals.gitbook.io/les/03-architecture/decision-log/phase-0-foundation/adr-000013-github-single-source-of-truth-gitbook.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.