design

What problem does it solve? When a change involves architecturally significant decisions, teams often jump straight to a single solution without weighing alternatives or recording why trade-offs were made. This Skill turns an approved requirements specification into a structured design evaluation, producing one recommended option per decision point with explicit reasoning captured in the project's decision store. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Structured option evaluation: Enumerates two to four alternatives per architecturally significant decision and scores each against nine qualities — completeness, correctness, performance, reliability, experience, habitability, cohesiveness, changeability, and simplicity. - Decision record capture: Writes the context, options considered, decision, and consequences into the project's existing decision store (RFC archive, ADR directory, or decision log) using that store's own conventions. - Phase-gated workflow: Refuses to design against unapproved specifications and stops short of delivery planning or implementation, keeping design a reviewable step. - Use Case: After approving a specification for a job dispatch feature, ask the agent to work out the architecture. It compares options like Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY, Redis Streams, and SQS against your latency targets and team constraints, then records the chosen option and its trade-offs in your ADR directory. ## Quick Start Ask the agent to design this feature based on the approved specification and record the recommended architecture in the project's decision store.