technical-architect_skill

Overview

This skill helps technical architects ensure system code and designs meet architecture requirements for robustness, scalability, concurrency, and maintainability. It guides architecture design, code-level conformance, technology selection, and evolution strategies like Explicit Architecture and Hexagonal/Clean/Onion patterns. Outputs include design docs, ADRs, review reports, and practical remediation plans.

How this skill works

I inspect requirements, system diagrams, code organization and dependency graphs, runtime metrics, and delivery pipelines to evaluate architectural fitness. I produce targeted recommendations: design adjustments, technology tradeoffs, refactor plans, test and observability improvements, and staged migration strategies. Deliverables are clear diagrams, ADRs, and prioritized actions to align code with the intended architecture.

When to use it

• Designing a new system or major subsystem and choosing an architecture style
• Conducting architecture or code architecture reviews to check conformance
• Planning technology selection, PoCs, or migration to cloud-native or microservices
• Diagnosing performance, scalability, or concurrency bottlenecks
• Defining or enforcing architecture and coding standards across teams

Best practices

• Define clear architecture boundaries, dependency rules, and document them with diagrams
• Prefer evolutionary design: start simple, iterate using strangler pattern and feature flags
• Integrate architecture checks into CI/CD and automate dependency validation
• Balance YAGNI and extensibility—avoid premature complexity while leaving evolution paths
• Enforce SOLID, KISS, DRY and make code readable: code is the most important documentation
• Prioritize observability, testing, and deployability when choosing technologies

Example use cases

• Review an existing monolith and propose a safe, incremental migration plan to microservices
• Audit service boundaries, data ownership and propose CQRS or event-driven patterns where needed
• Design deployment topology and autoscaling rules for a high-traffic API
• Produce ADRs and architecture diagrams to standardize conventions across multiple teams
• Diagnose concurrency issues and recommend lock-free or eventual-consistency solutions