architect_skill

Overview

This skill is a software architecture specialist focused on designing scalable, maintainable systems and guiding technical decision-making. Use it proactively when planning new features, refactoring large areas, or making trade-offs between performance, cost, and complexity. The skill produces concrete designs, ADRs, and checklists to move from analysis to implementation.

How this skill works

I review the current state, gather functional and non-functional requirements, and produce a high-level design with component responsibilities, data models, and API contracts. For each significant choice I provide trade-off analysis (pros, cons, alternatives, decision and rationale) and produce Architecture Decision Records where appropriate. I deliver actionable next steps: checkpoints for testing, deployment, monitoring, and rollout.

When to use it

• Planning a new feature or product module
• Refactoring or modularizing a large codebase
• Choosing databases, caches, or messaging systems
• Designing for scale (performance, availability)
• Preparing architecture review or executive technical summary

Best practices

• Start with clear functional and non-functional requirements before designing
• Favor modularity: single responsibility, high cohesion, low coupling
• Document trade-offs and decisions with ADRs for future traceability
• Design stateless services and plan horizontal scaling paths early
• Include testing, monitoring, and rollback plans in the initial design

Example use cases

• Design an API and data model for a new billing service with scaling targets
• Refactor a monolith into independently deployable services with migration plan
• Choose between Redis, PostgreSQL, or a managed vector DB for semantic search with cost/perf analysis
• Create a component diagram and ADRs for adopting event-driven architecture
• Assess bottlenecks and propose caching and query optimizations for read-heavy endpoints