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What are decisions?

When a candidate makes a significant architectural choice — switching a queue model, redesigning a schema, choosing between implementation approaches — Promptster captures their rationale as a decision_event. These are the highest-signal artifacts in a session. Unlike file diffs or commands, decisions represent the candidate’s reasoning, not just their actions. They answer the question: does this candidate think about tradeoffs, or just implement the first idea that works?

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Getting decisions for a session

GET /v1/sessions/:id/decisions Returns all decision_event entries for the session, ordered by timestamp. 
curl "https://api.promptster.ai/v1/sessions/SESSION_ID/decisions" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <your-token>"

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Example response

{
  "decisions": [...]
}

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Decision event fields

Each decision in the decisions array is a full timeline event. The event data payload contains:
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title
string
Short description of the decision.
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chosenOption
string
What the candidate decided to do.
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context
string
Background and situation that prompted the decision.
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tradeoffs
string
What was given up or risked by choosing this option.
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rationale
string
The candidate’s explanation of why they chose this option.
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impactScore
integer
Significance rating from 1 (minor) to 5 (major).
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capturedVia
string
How the decision was captured: mcp (via the Promptster MCP tool), cli (via promptster explain), or async-decision-enrichment (auto-detected and enriched after the session).
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category
string
Type of decision, e.g. architecture, dependency, config.
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severity
string
high, medium, or low.
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missedDecision
boolean
If true, Promptster auto-detected this as a significant decision that the candidate did not explicitly document. It has been flagged for follow-up.

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What to look for

Decision count and significance — did the candidate capture meaningful tradeoffs, or only trivial ones? A session with high-impact changes and zero decisions may indicate the candidate is not thinking about consequences. Rationale quality — is the reasoning substantive? “I chose Postgres because it’s familiar” is thin. “I chose Postgres because this data is relational and we need strong consistency guarantees for the billing path; the tradeoff is schema rigidity if requirements change” is strong. Missed decisions — any decision with missedDecision: true was detected by Promptster but not explicitly documented by the candidate. These are worth probing in a follow-up interview. Tradeoff awareness — does the candidate acknowledge what they gave up? Recognizing that a choice has costs — even if the costs are acceptable — signals mature engineering judgment.
Candidates using promptster explain can document decisions at any point during the session. High-quality rationale — acknowledging tradeoffs and reasoning about reversibility — is a strong positive signal.