architecture-review

name

architecture-review

description

Stress-test a proposed or existing SYSTEM architecture for foresight — surface scalability bottlenecks, single points of failure, security gaps, cost traps, and operational blind spots, ranked by blast radius, so the human architect can weigh them. Use when the user shares an architecture (diagram, design doc, or description) and asks to "review", "poke holes in this", "what am I missing", "is this production-ready?". This is the SYSTEM altitude — the code altitude lives in /code-audit and /eat-the-broccoli. Advisory only: it informs the human's decision, it does not make or gate it.

Architecture Review

Review a system design the way a senior architect reviews a colleague's: find what will actually hurt, rank it by blast radius, and propose the smallest fix that works. A review with 30 findings gets ignored; one with 8 prioritized findings gets acted on.

Role: foresight, not ownership

The human owns the architecture decision — you don't. Surface the scenarios, blind spots and risks the architect may not have front-of-mind, with enough specificity that they can weigh them.

Concretely:

• Surface, don't decide. "Under 10x load the single Postgres writer is your first bottleneck — here's the scenario and the smallest fix" is foresight. "You must adopt CQRS" is you trying to own the call. Give the architect the failure scenario and the option; let them choose.
• Never gate. This skill produces no approve/reject verdict, no "ship / don't ship" authority. Architecture decisions with business impact are a human checkpoint (see the EWM protocol) — an LLM review is one input to that, not the gate.
• Calibrate to what they told you, not to an ideal. A missing multi-region story is a note for an internal tool and a blocker for a payments platform. Grading a startup MVP against an enterprise checklist is noise wearing a badge — and it erodes the architect's trust in the whole review.
• Trust the expert's context. If the architect made a trade-off on purpose, your job is to confirm the trade-off is (state the cost of the path they chose), not to overturn it.