diff --git a/docs/adr/004-pdfbox-thumbnails.md b/docs/adr/004-pdfbox-thumbnails.md
index e102a8b7..4d799545 100644
--- a/docs/adr/004-pdfbox-thumbnails.md
+++ b/docs/adr/004-pdfbox-thumbnails.md
@@ -37,6 +37,12 @@ Render thumbnails in-process in Spring Boot using **Apache PDFBox 3.0.4** (alrea
 - PDFBox is a parser attack surface. Mitigated by a 30-second watchdog timeout in `ThumbnailAsyncRunner` and by the fire-and-forget contract (failures never break upload).
 - Memory ceiling: the `thumbnailExecutor` is capped at 2 threads on the CX32 (8 GB). A busy backfill alongside OCR can approach the 3 GB heap — acceptable but not comfortable. Streaming via `FileService.downloadFileStream` keeps this bounded for PDFs up to 50 MB.
 
+### Operational caveats (intentional)
+
+**Backfill state is in-memory and single-node.** `ThumbnailBackfillService.currentStatus` is a volatile reference updated on the thumbnail executor thread. Restarting the backend mid-run loses progress and the next `runBackfillAsync()` starts over. This mirrors `MassImportService.ImportStatus` and is acceptable because the household archive runs as a single Spring Boot process, backfill is a rare one-shot admin action, and re-running the backfill is idempotent (`findByFilePathIsNotNullAndThumbnailKeyIsNull()` naturally skips completed documents).
+
+**`ThumbnailService` and `ThumbnailBackfillService` inject `DocumentRepository` directly.** This is a deliberate exception to the project's "services never reach into another domain's repository" rule. Treating thumbnails as a cross-cutting aspect of `Document` rather than a sub-domain avoids a circular dependency (`DocumentService` → `ThumbnailAsyncRunner` → `DocumentService` would close the loop). If thumbnail state grows beyond two columns into its own domain model, extract a proper `ThumbnailRepository` at that point — not before.
+
 ## Future Direction
 
 - If a second image-processing job (OCR region crops, sharing previews) arrives, revisit moving all image work to `ocr-service` so the two share a single PyMuPDF instance.