architecture-review

name	architecture-review
description	Perform a thorough architecture review of a .NET project examining structure, maintainability, clarity, robustness, and goal achievement. Use when the user asks to review, audit, or examine a codebase.
disable-model-invocation	true
user-invocable	true
argument-hint	["project-path"]

Architecture Review

Perform a comprehensive architecture review of the project at $ARGUMENTS (or the current working directory if no argument provided).

Review Dimensions

Evaluate the codebase across these five dimensions:

1. Structure - Project organization, layer separation, dependency direction, naming conventions
2. Maintainability - DRY, consistency, ease of modification, test coverage, convention enforcement
3. Clarity - Readability, documentation, dead code, misleading patterns, surprising behavior
4. Robustness - Error handling, validation, edge cases, security, data integrity
5. Goal Achievement - Does the project accomplish what it sets out to do? Is it fit for purpose?

Approach

Phase 1: Parallel Exploration

Launch up to 5 Explore agents in parallel, each focused on a different area:

1. Project Structure agent: Solution file, all .csproj files, Directory.Build.props, Program.cs, DI wiring, configuration files
2. Domain Layer agent: All entities, value objects, enums, domain events, base classes, validation patterns
3. Application Layer agent: Commands, queries, handlers, validators, DTOs, mapping, pipeline behaviors, error handling
4. Infrastructure Layer agent: DbContext, entity configurations, repository implementations, migrations, external integrations
5. API & Tests agent: Endpoints/controllers, middleware, filters, ALL test files (unit, integration, convention), test infrastructure

Each agent should READ EVERY FILE in its area — do not skim.

Phase 2: Cross-Cutting Analysis

After exploration, analyze the codebase for issues across all dimensions. Focus on:

• Exception → HTTP status mapping: Trace every exception type thrown by handlers through the middleware/global handler to verify correct HTTP status codes
• Convention test coverage: Do the convention tests actually catch what they claim to? Check for gaps in assembly scanning scope
• Validation consistency: Compare domain guards vs application validators — look for drift or missing coverage
• Data access patterns: Verify CQRS boundaries, check for accidental cross-reads (EF in queries, Dapper in commands)
• Dead code: Unused attributes, unreachable branches, ghost database columns, no-op methods
• Logging consistency: Duplicate logging across layers, missing logs for important paths
• Security: Injection vectors, authentication gaps, sensitive data exposure

Phase 3: Findings Document

Produce findings using this template for each issue:

### N. [SHORT TITLE]

**Severity: High|Medium|Low** | Files: `file.cs:line`, `other.cs:line`

[1-3 sentence description of the problem and its impact]

**Fix**: [Concrete, actionable fix — not vague advice]

Severity definitions:

• High: Bugs, incorrect behavior, security issues, data integrity risks
• Medium: Inconsistencies, test gaps, maintainability hazards that will cause issues as the project grows
• Low: Clarity improvements, polish, minor optimizations

Phase 4: Summary

End with:

1. A summary table: | # | Finding | Severity | Category |
2. An overall assessment (2-3 sentences)
3. A recommended fix order (highest-impact first)
4. Verification steps (build, test, manual checks)

Comprehensive Multi-Agent Mode (for "thorough"/"comprehensive"/"audit everything" requests)

When the user wants an exhaustive audit (and especially when multi-agent orchestration is opted in), scale Phase 1–2 into a find → dedup → adversarially verify workflow via the Workflow tool instead of a single pass. This codebase is mature and hardened, with a long history of dismissing plausible "HIGH/CRITICAL" findings as false positives (the current self-assessed score lives in docs/ARCHITECTURE_REVIEW.md — never trust a number embedded in skill text), so the dominant failure mode is plausible-but-wrong findings, not missed bugs. Structure the workflow to refute, not to accumulate:

1. Find — fan out one finder per subsystem. The eight that map to this repo: security/auth (gateway assertion, scopes, MFA, owner-only policy), CQRS/domain, data-access/persistence, eventing/outbox/Service Bus, payload-capture/PII, build/CI/reproducibility, concurrency/correctness, and convention-test rigor. Tell each finder the bar is high, to ground every finding in file:line with quoted evidence, and that zero findings is an acceptable answer.
2. Dedup — merge by file + normalized title in plain code (a barrier is correct here).
3. Verify — for each candidate, spawn 3 independent skeptics with different lenses (code-truth: re-read the path and its callers; defense-in-depth: is it already covered by a guard/validator/constraint/convention; exploitability: is it actually reachable). Each is instructed to refute; keep a finding only on a 2-of-3 majority.

Prior dismissed false positives that recur — do not re-raise without new evidence: the cancel-path "stock double-restore" (blocked by the state machine), Money.Subtract negative escape (routes through Create()), the AppHost packages.lock.json exemption (intentional — Aspire host-RID packages), and "convention tests assert presence not behaviour" (most have already been hardened to IL/SQL behaviour checks).

Verifying Fixes (do this before marking any finding resolved)

A convention/regression test that always passes is worthless. For every fix, prove the test fails on the regression it guards:

1. Inject the exact regression the test should catch (e.g. change Guid.CreateVersion7() → Guid.NewGuid(), or point a dependency check at a type nothing injects).
2. Run the test — confirm it fails with the intended message.
3. Revert the regression and confirm green.

Guard against vacuous passes: any test that filters a discovered set (handlers, aggregates, endpoints) must Assert.NotEmpty on that set, so a renamed suffix or moved assembly can't make it silently pass.

Stale-build caveat: restoring a mutated source file via mv/cp of a backup can give it an older mtime than the regression-compiled DLL, so MSBuild skips the rebuild and a test looks like it's still failing. After reverting, touch the source (or build with --no-incremental) before re-running. Don't mistake a stale-DLL failure for a real one.

Shared Artifact: docs/ARCHITECTURE_REVIEW.md

Read it before starting (it carries the open findings and current score; the dated history and dismissed false positives live in docs/reviews/) and update it after: mark findings resolved with the fix + the regression test added, record dismissed false positives so they aren't re-raised, and adjust the score conservatively. It is the sync point across concurrent agent sessions. Keep AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md and .agents/skills↔.claude/skills in sync per the repo's drift rule.

Rules

• DO NOT penalize for absent features (outbox, distributed systems, event sourcing, etc.) unless the project claims to support them
• DO NOT recommend adding libraries/frameworks unless there's a concrete problem they solve
• DO recommend removing dead code and unnecessary complexity
• ALWAYS trace exception flows end-to-end — this is the #1 source of bugs in .NET APIs
• ALWAYS check that convention tests actually scan the assemblies they should
• Prefer fixing the root cause over adding workarounds (e.g., fix the global handler rather than adding try-catches everywhere)

Learnings from Past Reviews

These are real issues found in production .NET projects. Check for each of these specifically:

Exception Mapping Gaps

• Business rule violations must throw DomainRuleException (→ 409) and handler not-found must throw EntityNotFoundException (→ 404). Bare BCL InvalidOperationException/KeyNotFoundException deliberately map to 500: the BCL throws those itself (LINQ .Single(), dictionary misses), so treating them as client faults disguises server bugs as 409/404. ExceptionConventionTests blocks them from Domain and Application code.
• Endpoints that catch exceptions locally create inconsistency — some endpoints catch, some don't. Fix the global handler and remove all endpoint-level try-catches.

Convention Test Blind Spots

• Convention tests that scan only one assembly (e.g., ApiAssembly) may miss violations in other assemblies (e.g., DomainAssembly). Always verify the scan scope matches the intent.
• Rename tests to reflect their actual scope (e.g., ApiTypes_MustNotResolveCurrentTimeViaDateTime not Types_MustNotResolve...).

Dead Code Patterns

• DataAnnotation attributes ([Required], [StringLength], [Range]) on DTOs that use a custom IValidator<T> framework — these are never evaluated but mislead readers. Remove them AND their corresponding TryValidateObject() unit tests.
• Ghost database columns: when a migration drops some columns from a table, check if ALL dead columns were dropped. Dapper queries may silently reference leftover columns via fallbacks.

Duplicate Logging

• Endpoints and handlers both logging the same operation creates noise. Handlers are the authoritative layer — remove logging from endpoints. Exception: endpoint-level null-check logs (e.g., query returns null, endpoint returns 404) are fine since the handler doesn't log these.

Value Object Completeness

• Value objects that override Equals(object) and GetHashCode() should also implement IEquatable<T> to avoid boxing in LINQ operations.

Test Impact of Fixes

• Changing exception-to-status-code mapping (e.g., introducing DomainRuleException → 409) will break integration tests that assert on HTTP status codes. Search for HttpStatusCode.BadRequest and HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError in test files and update assertions.
• Removing DataAnnotation attributes from DTOs will break any tests using Validator.TryValidateObject(). These tests should be deleted, not fixed — they test dead validation.

Presence-vs-Behaviour Convention Gaps (recurring finding class)

• A convention test that asserts a marker/type/interface is present often does not prove the behaviour happens. Real gaps found this way: injecting IOwnerOnlyPolicy without invoking it; injecting ICacheInvalidator without calling it; declaring a Guid Id without minting it via Guid.CreateVersion7(); enforcing only the negative CQRS rule (command handlers must not use IDbConnection) without the positive one (they MUST depend on ApplicationDbContext).
• The fix pattern is IL/SQL scanning: reuse the existing ContainsCallToMethod(il, module, name) helper to scan constructor/method IL (including async state machines) for the required call, and the SQL-literal regex checks for owner-scoped Dapper predicates. Prefer behaviour checks over name/source-text scans.

Verify Before Trusting the Score

• A high score with "no open findings" is a prompt to verify against code, not to trust prior claims. Each rerun should re-read the actual paths. Most candidate findings on a mature codebase are false positives — the value is in the adversarial verification that filters them, and in the small number of real presence-vs-behaviour gaps that survive.