What is temporal reasoning?

Example: In 2022, your team's best practice was to avoid microservices and keep the monolith — the codebase was small, the team was four people, and coordination costs dwarfed any scaling benefit. In 2025, the team is forty people, the monolith deploys take an hour, and microservices are the obvious move. A new hire reads your 2022 architecture decision record and says, 'This contradicts our current strategy.' It does not. Both positions were correct — at different times. The variable that changed was scale. The contradiction dissolves the moment you add a timestamp to each claim.

This concept is part of Contradiction Resolution in the How to Think curriculum.