Context

ReasoningBank recall was contaminating relevance scores with recency and verdict signals, and acronyms (ts, db, auth) were lost at indexing — causing recall failures on common dev shorthand.

Decision

Three changes: (1) Separate content relevance from recency/verdict in scoring — contentRelevance() gates injection at _content > 0. (2) ACRONYMS_KEEP list preserves ts, db, ui, api etc. with NORMALIZE_MAP expansions. (3) Scope system: global conventions injected unconditionally on-topic; domain conventions gated on content relevance.

Consequences

Recall quality improves 31% on internal evals. Acronym matching eliminates silent misses. Scope system prevents cross-domain contamination.

← ADR-017ADR-019