Most infrastructure repositories are good at preserving state. Far fewer preserve the rationale that made the state intentional.
Configuration is not architecture memory.
A route policy can tell you what an attribute is. It rarely tells you which business requirement justified it, which failure domain it protects, who accepted the tradeoff, or which future event should trigger re-review.
The missing record
A durable architecture decision should link requirement, evidence, assumption, human authority, validation criteria, rollback context, and invalidation triggers. That record can then be re-evaluated when evidence ages or infrastructure changes.
What was decided. Why. Based on what. By whom. Under which conditions. And what would make the answer stale.
Why AI changes the value
Structured decision provenance gives AI systems context that is much more useful than a pile of old documents. It also gives humans a way to inspect and challenge the context the system is using.