# ADR 0141: ADR citations take one strippable form and strip at render time

**Status**: accepted

## Context

The map cites its decision records densely — that density is what lets a repo agent surface "we decided against that ([ADR NNNN])" mid-task, and thinning it would make every future session dumber. But the docs site launches from the same tree, and citation density is a poor reading experience for humans: launch-readiness reviews flagged pages where parenthetical record numbers interrupt every second sentence.

The insight from the decision session: citation density was only ever a _reader_ problem, not an _author_ problem. So density becomes a render-time concern, not an editorial one — provided every citation takes a form a machine can remove without damaging the sentence around it. Citations written as grammatical subjects ("per ADR 0074, the file is co-owned") cannot be stripped; citations appended to the clause they support can.

## Decision

Every ADR reference in published-tier prose takes ONE normalized form: a parenthetical group of linked citations at clause end — `([ADR 0110](../_adr/0110-the-landing-model.md))`, comma-separated when a clause cites several records. The invariant the form buys, and the test the gate enforces (`tests/adr_citation_form_test.ts`): **prose reads correctly with the citation deleted**. Bare `(ADR NNNN)` text, citations woven in as grammatical subjects, and number/destination mismatches fail `discern done`. Agents keep citing as liberally as reasoning requires, forever.

One stripper in the doc model (`stripAdrCitations`) removes the groups from human-rendered prose; one collector (`collectAdrCitations`) gathers each page's cited records onto the entry (`DocEntry.citedAdrs`) so human surfaces can present them separately (a related-decisions footer, a structured `cited_adrs` field). The surface split:

- **Stripped** (human eyes): site HTML, terminal `discern help`, MCP `discern_help` content.
- **Retained** (agent/machine consumers): the map on disk, `discern map` content, raw `.md` editions, `--raw`, exports, and llms surfaces — their consumers benefit from the citations exactly as repo agents do.

Unpublished tiers and private planning or research pages carry no render contract and are exempt from the form. The existing law stands unchanged: documentation may cite decisions; the product's own output may not (`tests/adr_vocab_guard_test.ts`).

## Consequences

- Human-rendered pages read clean with zero editorial upkeep; per-page claim-to-decision traceability survives through the collected citations.
- The published tiers were normalized once (76 sites) to seed the invariant; every future page holds it or fails the gate.
- Authors accept a small grammatical discipline: a citation may never carry the sentence. Where a record IS the subject ("this decision is recorded in…"), the sentence must name the topic in words and cite at the end.
- The stripper only removes the normalized form — the gate is what guarantees nothing else exists in published prose, so the two mechanisms must ship and hold together.