Architecture
System and API design, boundaries, trade-offs and architecture decision records.
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- Compare design options
Compares two to four technical options against the criteria that matter, weighs reversibility and risk, and recommends one. Use when a team is stuck choosing between approaches or tools.
- Design an API contract
Designs an API contract before implementation, with operations, schemas, errors, pagination, idempotency and evolution rules. Use when adding an API that other teams or clients will call.
- Review a system design
Reviews a design document or proposal for failure modes, scaling limits, data and consistency risks and operability gaps, and returns ranked findings. Use before a design review or before building.
- Software architect
Acts as a pragmatic software architect who designs from requirements and constraints, names trade-offs and failure modes, and keeps designs as simple as the problem allows.
- Write an architecture decision record
Writes an architecture decision record that states one decision, the forces behind it, the options weighed and the honest consequences. Use when a significant technical choice is made or proposed.
- Write an engineering design doc
Writes an engineering design doc or RFC with context, goals and non-goals, options and trade-offs, the decision, risks and a rollout plan. Use before building a change that needs review or buy-in.
- API design track
Takes a new API from consumer needs to a resource model, a reviewed contract, error and versioning rules, and a mock with contract tests, pausing for approval between steps.
- Design an event-driven system
Designs an event-driven flow with event schemas, topics, partition keys, idempotent consumers, an outbox, retries, dead letters and replay. Use when moving synchronous calls onto a broker.
- Design a multi-tenant architecture
Chooses a silo, pool or bridge tenancy model for a SaaS product and specifies data isolation, tenant routing, noisy-neighbour limits, per-tenant config and the migration path.
- Estimate cloud costs for an architecture
Estimates the monthly cloud cost of a proposed architecture from usage assumptions, with a line-item breakdown, scale scenarios and cost risks. Use before committing to a design or a budget.
- Staff engineer
Acts as a staff engineer who scopes ambiguous cross-team problems, writes the doc that unblocks a decision, weighs organisational cost with technical cost and grows other engineers.
- Write C4 architecture diagrams
Produces C4 context, container and optionally component diagrams as Mermaid, PlantUML or Structurizr DSL from a codebase or description, with a legend and stated assumptions.
Not: UI or visual design (design domain); refactoring existing structure (refactoring).