complexity-cliff-review

name	complexity-cliff-review
description	Review a proposed feature set or implementation plan for requirements whose engineering cost is disproportionately high relative to their apparent product value.

Complexity Cliff Review

Review the relevant requirements, design, or implementation plan in the conversation.

Identify complexity cliffs: requirements that appear minor or optional from a product perspective but introduce disproportionate implementation, architectural, operational, or maintenance cost.

Focus especially on requirements that create a new class of system concern, such as:

• durable or background workflows
• retries, idempotency, or recovery
• synchronization, ordering, or conflict resolution
• persistent state machines
• queues, schedulers, or real-time infrastructure
• distributed coordination or transactional boundaries
• permissions, security boundaries, or multitenancy
• migrations, versioning, or backward compatibility
• offline behavior or eventual consistency

For each meaningful cliff, explain:

1. Requirement
2. Why it looks inexpensive
3. Hidden cost
4. Architectural consequences
5. Blast radius and ongoing maintenance
6. Lower-cost alternative, when one exists

Then provide:

Highest-Leverage Findings

Rank the requirements with the highest cost relative to apparent product value.

Hidden Commitments

Call out requirements that implicitly commit the project to a new subsystem, infrastructure component, correctness guarantee, or durable workflow.

Complexity Collapses

Identify small requirement changes or removals that would eliminate substantial downstream complexity.

Do not merely list difficult implementation tasks. Look for phase changes in architecture: places where one seemingly modest requirement changes the kind of system that must be built.

Be direct, skeptical, and specific. Distinguish genuine complexity cliffs from ordinary engineering work.