Capture a Team Decision

The most important thing Momental does is preserve the reasoning behind your team's decisions — not just what you decided, but why. This cookbook covers three ways to capture a decision right after it's made.

Path 1: Huginn chat (fastest)

Open the Huginn chat and describe the decision conversationally. Huginn will extract the key atoms and show them to you for review.

Example prompt:

We just decided to sunset the v1 API on January 1st. The main reason was that fewer than 3%
of active users are still on v1, and maintaining two API surfaces was slowing down all new
development. We considered a longer grace period but decided the migration tooling we already
shipped makes a clean cutoff reasonable.

Huginn will extract something like:

[
  {
    "type": "DECISION",
    "statement": "v1 API will be sunset on January 1st"
  },
  {
    "type": "DATA",
    "statement": "Fewer than 3% of active users are still on the v1 API"
  },
  {
    "type": "LEARNING",
    "statement": "Maintaining two API surfaces was slowing new development velocity"
  }
]

Review the draft atoms in the conversation panel. Publish the ones that are accurate. Each published atom improves future Huginn conversations that touch the same domain.

Path 2: MCP (most control)

Create the atoms directly if you want precise control over the statement, type, and links.

// The decision itself
const decision = await momental_node_create({
  statement: "v1 API will be sunset on January 1st. Migration tooling is available at /docs/migration.",
  nodeType: "DECISION",
  status: "ACTIVE",
  domain: "engineering",
  tags: ["api", "versioning", "deprecation"]
});

// The evidence behind it (optional but valuable)
const data = await momental_node_create({
  statement: "As of Q3, fewer than 3% of active users are still calling v1 endpoints",
  nodeType: "DATA",
  status: "ACTIVE",
  domain: "engineering"
});

// Link the decision to its evidence
await momental_node_link({
  fromNodeId: decision.id,
  toNodeId: data.id,
  linkType: "DERIVES_FROM"
});

// Link to the relevant strategy node
await momental_node_link({
  fromNodeId: decision.id,
  toNodeId: "epic_api_modernization",
  linkType: "LINKED_TO"
});

Path 3: Meeting notes upload (batch)

If you have meeting notes, upload them as a document. Momental extracts all the decisions, learnings, and data points automatically.

const doc = await momental_document_add({
  title: "API Strategy Meeting — Nov 14",
  content: meetingNotesText,  // plain text or markdown
  domain: "engineering"
});

// Extraction takes 1-2 minutes. Check status:
const status = await momental_document_status({ documentId: doc.id });
// status.status === "COMPLETE" when ready

// Publish the document (makes all extracted atoms reviewable)
await momental_document_publish({ documentId: doc.id });

After publishing, go to Knowledge → Documents in the UI to review and selectively publish the extracted atoms.

What makes a good decision atom

A good decision atom answers: "If a new engineer asked why we do it this way, what would you tell them?"

After capturing — link the reasoning chain

A DECISION atom is most powerful when linked to the LEARNING that justifies it. Momental flags decisions without a parent learning as a structural gap — a decision without documented evidence is a liability when the people who made it leave.

LEARNING: "Every time we shipped a large migration without a deadline, users stayed
           on the old version indefinitely. Two years of v1 co-existence is proof."
    ↓ DERIVES_FROM
DECISION: "v1 API will be sunset on January 1st"