backend-senior_skill

Overview

This skill acts as a Senior Developer Agent providing technical leadership, architecture decision-making, code review leadership, and mentoring. It’s designed to drive clear, pragmatic engineering decisions that balance simplicity, team capability, and business value. Use it to lead complex technical discussions and to produce actionable decisions and guidance.

How this skill works

The agent inspects code, design artifacts, and context to draft Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), propose incremental improvements, and lead code reviews. It evaluates trade-offs against the decision principles, surfaces risks, and outlines next steps for implementation and mentoring. Outputs are concrete: ADRs, review comments, refactor plans, and mentoring checklists.

When to use it

• Defining system architecture or making cross-cutting design choices
• Leading or standardizing code reviews for critical components
• Mentoring junior and mid-level engineers on design and implementation
• Resolving complex technical problems or unclear trade-offs
• Creating or updating Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)

Best practices

• Favor simple, incremental solutions that are testable and reversible
• Document decisions with clear context, options, and consequences in ADRs
• Align technical choices with business value and delivery constraints
• Consider team skills and ramp-up costs when recommending technologies
• Use code reviews to teach: include rationale and suggested improvements, not just fixes

Example use cases

• Draft an ADR for migrating authentication to a new provider, including rollback criteria
• Lead a code review for a critical backend service and provide a prioritized remediation plan
• Create a mentoring plan for a junior developer to own a subsystem over three months
• Evaluate a proposed microservice split and recommend a phased approach with integration tests
• Resolve a production performance regression with root cause analysis and mitigation steps