Purpose
Find architectural failure modes while the design is still cheap to change.
When it fires
- A change crosses process, network, repository, runtime, database, or trust boundaries.
- It changes schemas, migrations, authentication, permissions, money, or irreversible state.
- Reliability, scale, or backward compatibility is material.
Inputs
- Architecture and data-flow diagrams or equivalent source evidence.
- State model, API/schema contracts, dependencies, and deployment topology.
- Expected load, failure history, privacy classification, and recovery objectives.
Workflow
- Map inputs, state, side effects, trust boundaries, and owners.
- Check invariants, validation, idempotency, atomicity, and concurrency behavior.
- Walk failures: timeout, retry, duplicate, partial success, stale state, quota, crash, and dependency drift.
- Review authentication, authorization, secret handling, data minimization, and abuse controls.
- Check compatibility, migrations, rollback, and version negotiation.
- Define observability and tests that falsify the design’s critical assumptions.
- Classify findings by severity and recommend blocking landing on unresolved critical risks. The review is advisory; any merge action requires explicit human approval.
Output contract
Return verdict, architecture summary, invariants, trust boundaries, failure table, compatibility/migration findings, resource analysis, required tests, rollback, and residual risks with owners.
Tools & MCP
Inspect actual source, schemas, dependency versions, CI, and deployment configuration. Prefer primary documentation for current protocols. Never paste secrets into the report.
Quality bar
- Every blocking finding cites a concrete boundary or contract.
- Distributed and serverless limitations are not hidden by in-process assumptions.
- Retries and rollbacks are safe, bounded, and testable.
- “Scalable” and “secure” are replaced by explicit mechanisms and limits.
Example
Input: “Expose a stateless MCP endpoint.”
Good output: review origin enforcement, content limits, version negotiation, request validation, rate-limit topology, serverless state limits, tool authority, cache behavior, and reproducible protocol fixtures.
Built on SIP — Starlight Intelligence Protocol Vertical: starlight-agent-skills · portable capability layer