architect — guides¶

Solution architecture as three skills plus one review subagent. architect-design frames a problem, weighs a technical choice, or designs a system without a diagram as the headline. architect-diagram draws the system, flow, state, data model, or deployment topology. architect-review critiques an existing design doc, diagram, RFC, or ADR inline, and its read-only sibling subagent design-reviewer runs the same critique in a forked context that hasn't seen the authoring — the independent pass you reach for after writing a design yourself. They lean on a repo's reference.md — the golden path that says how this codebase is built — when one is present.

All three are knowledge-surface aware. When an internal knowledge surface is reachable — an enterprise-knowledge MCP tool, an internal CLI, an in-repo doc set (public web doesn't count) — architect-design consults it before proposing and names what it drew from, architect-diagram grounds the beyond-repo parts of a document- or update-mode diagram against it, and architect-review flags claims about the world asserted with no cited surface. What can't be grounded becomes a named question or a flag, never a guess.

New here? Establish your repo's reference architecture gives the skills something to design against.

Tutorials¶

• Your first architecture session — Start here — the guided first session from install verification to your first architecture artifact.
• Create and use your reference.md — stand up the golden-path file from scratch and put it to work.

How-to¶

• Establish your repo's reference architecture — capture the stack, patterns, and constraints the architect skills design against.
• Shape an architecture concept — get a ≤½-page Stage-0 concept agreed with architect-design before committing to a full design doc.
• Diagram a system — draw a system, flow, state, data-model, or deployment-topology diagram with architect-diagram.
• Review an architecture artifact — get a severity-tagged critique of a design doc, diagram, RFC, or ADR with architect-review, or an independent forked-context pass with the design-reviewer subagent.

Reference¶

• reference.md sections and the stack-pack contract — every section of the golden-path file and how stack packs extend it.

Explanation¶

• Why the architect-diagram skill works the way it does — the reasoning behind direction defaults, layout choices, visual encoding, notation routing, and the anti-pattern register.

Installing and upgrading live in ../_shared/.