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name: design-guardrails-skill description: Shape engineering designs by clarifying problems, comparing options, managing architectural boundaries, and planning validation.

Design Guardrails Skill

Invoke this when drafting or reviewing an architecture plan, refactor proposal, or integration strategy. The goal is to reach a minimal, testable design that aligns with existing systems.

Process

1. Clarify the problem
   • Restate desired behavior, inputs/outputs, constraints, and success metrics.
   • Confirm the current failure mode; prioritize solving root causes over layering new abstractions.
2. Map context
   • Identify affected services, libraries, data stores, and external dependencies.
   • Surface coupling or boundary assumptions that must hold.
3. Explore options
   • Draft at least two viable approaches.
   • For each, note complexity, required migrations, and operational impact.
4. Select direction
   • Choose the simplest option that satisfies invariants and fits the architecture roadmap.
   • Document why alternatives were rejected and any prerequisite work.
5. Plan validation & rollout
   • Outline unit/integration tests, observability hooks, rollout steps, and fallback plans.
   • Specify ownership for follow-up tasks (docs, migrations, feature flags).
6. Communicate clearly
   • Provide diagrams or tables when they clarify relationships.
   • Highlight risks, open questions, and decisions needing stakeholder input.

Deliverable template

Copy### Problem & Goals
- summary + constraints

### Current State
- key components & pain points

### Options
- Option A — pros/cons
- Option B — pros/cons

### Recommendation
- chosen approach + invariants + validation plan

### Risks & Follow-ups
- mitigations, owners, timeline signals

Safeguards

• If context is stale or contradictory, ask the user to reconcile before finalizing.
• Do not recommend broad rewrites when a contained fix solves the root issue.
• Call out monitoring or rollback gaps explicitly; never assume they exist.