I don’t agree on the Prius. The 2026 version has worse consumption and a smaller trunk so it could look more like any other SUV. People buy these cause they are the best economics for the size and Toyota made it more like “what they think a phev suv should look like”. I’d say that’s the opposite of your point.

I have a more mixed approach.

Decisions or attempts, i try to document them as comments on the ticket. It feels a bit like a conversation with my future self 😄

Things that pop up in my head that I don’t want to forget, but don’t have time to write out, I put in a new tab on nodepad++

Archi things go as markdown in de source code

Investigations and reports in a wiki

All these have all the pros of an engineering handbook out of the box (date, issuer, …)

I only use paper for the stuff I don’t want a trail off and just want to throw away afterwards.