Rationale extracts the decisions, trade-offs, risks, and evidence buried in your RFCs, design docs, and meeting notes - so your team always knows why something was built the way it was.
Ask anything about your project decisions
Rationale doesn't search your files. It reconstructs the reasoning behind them - then makes it queryable.
Connect RFCs, design docs, architecture reviews, meeting notes, Jira exports, or any text artifact. Rationale ingests and indexes everything.
Rationale identifies decisions, problems, alternatives, risks, approvers, and evidence - and stores them as first-class objects, not just text chunks.
Ask why a decision was made, who approved it, what alternatives were rejected, or what risks were flagged - and get answers backed by evidence from your own documents.
Rationale never answers without evidence. Every response links back to the specific artifact, session, or review that supports it.
Most tools help you find documents. Rationale helps you understand the reasoning inside them.
Decisions are extracted and stored as structured objects - not buried in paragraphs. Every decision links to its problem, alternatives, and approvers.
Every answer is grounded in cited artifacts. Rationale never generates rationale from thin air - it reconstructs it from what your team actually wrote.
Upload PDFs, Markdown, plain text, and more. Rationale extracts structured knowledge regardless of format or source.
Decisions link to risks, risks link to outcomes, outcomes link to systems. Trace the full chain of reasoning across your project's history.
Organize knowledge by project. Each project has its own artifact library, decision history, and question interface - keeping context clean and relevant.
Combines keyword and semantic search with reranking to find the most relevant evidence - not just the most similar text.
Rationale is built around the questions that matter - the ones that today require pinging the right person or digging through old Slack threads.
"Why did we choose Kafka over RabbitMQ?"
Decision rationale"Who approved the move to microservices?"
Ownership"What risks were identified for the auth rewrite?"
Risk history"What alternatives were rejected for the data pipeline?"
Alternatives"What prompted the decision to rewrite the billing service?"
Trigger"Would we still make this decision today?"
Decision audit"What systems depend on the cache layer?"
Dependencies"What assumptions was the v2 API design based on?"
AssumptionsStop re-litigating the past. Give every engineer, new or veteran, instant access to the rationale behind your engineering decisions.