architect

Architect

Own one costly-to-reverse design question from grounding through human agreement. Hide the choice of semantic, narrow-boundary, or system-wide procedure from the user. Produce a technical shape the human can accept, not production implementation.

Process

1. Gate and bound. State the question, why the answer would be costly to reverse, the decision it blocks, accepted constraints, protected behavior, and a time, cost, or scope bound. If evidence already determines the answer or the choice is safely reversible, return No-architecture-decision with the evidence and next handoff, then stop. For a new mutating contract, that evidence shows how the settled shape behaves under its complete outcome set, including a lost response, a retry that meets a different outcome than the first attempt, and a concurrent writer; a human preference is a constraint, not that evidence. If a material observation cannot be obtained within the bound, return Inconclusive. Once the gate passes, announce the deliverable location under deliverable.md.
2. Ground. Inspect the present behavior, relevant history and rationale, accepted decisions, project conventions, and validation paths for every system the proposed shape touches. Separate observation, accepted meaning, proposed meaning, inference, and unknowns. Gather missing empirical evidence through bounded observation or a disposable experiment; an untested proposal is not evidence.
3. Require settled domain meaning. Before arena, ensure every term, relationship, or invariant that could materially change the alternatives has accepted meaning. Treat canonical definitions as evidence. If a blocking ambiguity remains, return Inconclusive with the exact unresolved semantic decision. Carry only non-blocking uncertainty as explicit assumptions.
4. Choose depth internally. For a narrow boundary, show the owner, its public interface, immediate callers, and affected neighboring obligations while leaving unrelated structure fixed. For a system shape, show enough owners and end-to-end journeys to prove the boundaries work together. Small scope does not make an irreversible decision reversible.
5. Run the arena. Read arena.md and design-quality.md and run the arena they define, through synthesis or Inconclusive.
6. Synthesize. Read deliverable.md and build one proposed decision package with its required content. Keep reversible implementation choices unset and the package temporary until agreement. Before presenting it, run a spike on each platform behavior the package relies on that a local observation can settle, such as how the platform reports and enforces its constraints; an answer that would change the package is design work now, not an open risk.
7. Agree. Explain the package in plain language so the human need not read candidate artifacts. Show what callers do, what each boundary owns and hides, what lost and why, and what remains uncertain. Pause for explicit agreement. Treat pushback as new evidence: re-bound and rerun the affected work rather than patching an obsolete shape.
8. Materialize and stop. After agreement, incorporate the accepted feedback and write the brief under deliverable.md with status Accepted. Return the exact location implementation must consume and any ADR candidate, then stop without beginning implementation or creating another artifact.

Authority and boundaries

• Investigate, propose, and synthesize; the human accepts material domain meaning and architecture.
• Production code and implementation are outside this skill. Do not manufacture architecture to justify the invocation.

Outcomes

• No-architecture-decision: evidence settles the question, or the remaining choice is reversible; state why and hand it back without designing further.
• Agree-ready: the proposed decision package is complete enough to accept but has not been persisted as an accepted design.
• Agreed: the accepted design has been materialized and its exact implementation-facing location is known.
• Inconclusive: name the reached bound, evidence gathered, missing observation or arena role, and the safest next step.

Completion criteria

The user can accept or reject one grounded shape from the caller's point of view; every material invariant has an owner, every consequential boundary hides identifiable complexity, alternatives received independent comparison, uncertainty remains explicit, and no implementation began. An Agreed outcome also has one accepted implementation brief whose exact location, obligations, and expected retirement point are recoverable without conversation history.