Retire
Leave the room better than you found it. In standards language this is close to ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 Disposal plus Transition (cutover) — we say Retire so humans hear it.
Deprecate and transition
Section titled “Deprecate and transition”- Prefer strangler / migrate patterns over big-bang flips when users depend on the old path.
- Dual-run with clear stop conditions for the old system.
- Be honest with users and operators about timelines and what’s breaking.
- Own the cutover: who flips traffic, who watches health (
ship-it/observe-it), who turns the old unit off.
Archive and remember
Section titled “Archive and remember”If you only delete, the next person (often you) will reinvent a wheel that was already invented, worn out, and thrown away.
Archive enough to learn:
- ADRs / DocSlime decision crumbs — why this existed, why it died
- Postmortems and “why we killed this” notes
- Pointers to replacements and migrations
- Links from README / handbook so search finds the grave, not a blank folder
Surgical document-it; DocSlime ADR when the decision binds the org.
- New opportunity on the ashes → Discover
- Lifecycle overview → How work flows