deciduous.dev

What It Is

Deciduous is a “decision graph” tool for AI-assisted development. Its core goal is not to generate code, but to help Claude Code/Claude Desktop continuously record why certain choices were made during development. It models software development as goal → options → decision → actions → outcomes, with observation and revisit added on top, preserving the project’s reasoning chain, pivots, and implementation results in a graph structure.

Core Capabilities

Based on the main documentation, Deciduous is deeply integrated with the Claude ecosystem: after initialization, it creates slash commands, skills, hooks, and an MCP Server. /decision-graph can read Git commit history, identify the main narrative, rejected alternatives, and pivots, then generate nodes and edges; /work creates goal nodes before implementation and records subsequent actions and commits; /recover restores project state in a new session or after context compression. It also supports attaching screenshots, PDFs, and architecture diagrams, generating searchable descriptions for them. Its Q&A interface can answer questions based on the graph, such as “why did we switch from in-memory caching to Redis?”

Pricing and Deployment

The source text does not disclose any pricing, free tier, or commercial service information. Installation options include Homebrew, Cargo, and prebuilt binaries for macOS/Linux/Windows. Graphs can be browsed locally via deciduous serve or deployed to GitHub Pages via deciduous sync; the MCP Server provides 31 tools for Claude to access directly.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are clear: it addresses the pain points of AI-assisted programming where sessions end, context gets compressed, and decisions are forgotten. It also links decision chains to commits, files, and outcomes, making it useful for long-term maintenance and onboarding new team members. It emphasizes repository-based evidence and avoids unsupported speculation. The limitations are also obvious: it is primarily built around Claude Code/Claude Desktop, with no clear indication of equivalent support for tools such as Cursor or Copilot; graph quality depends on commit messages and the team’s habit of continuous documentation; Chinese-language support, privacy policy, and commercial support are not clearly specified.

Who It’s For and Access from China

Deciduous is suitable for individual developers and engineering teams that make heavy use of Claude for development, need to maintain complex project history, and care about traceable architecture decisions. The source text does not specify accessibility from China. Since the tool itself can be installed locally, but Claude-related capabilities in mainland China may typically be affected by network access and account/payment conditions, actual usability should be verified independently. Alternatives include ADR documents, GitHub Issues/PR templates, Obsidian/Notion knowledge bases, or other MCP-based context management tools.