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ask skill

/.claude/skills/ask

This skill helps senior architects obtain concise, high-level architectural guidance and trade-off analysis for complex technical questions.

npx playbooks add skill duc01226/easyplatform --skill ask

Review the files below or copy the command above to add this skill to your agents.

Files (1)
SKILL.md
3.4 KB
---
name: ask
description: "[Planning] ⚡ Answer technical and architectural questions."
argument-hint: [technical-question]
infer: true
---

## Context
Technical question or architecture challenge:
<questions>$ARGUMENTS</questions>

Current development workflows, system constraints, scale requirements, and business context will be considered:
- Primary workflow: `./.claude/workflows/primary-workflow.md`
- Development rules: `./.claude/workflows/development-rules.md`
- Orchestration protocols: `./.claude/workflows/orchestration-protocol.md`
- Documentation management: `./.claude/workflows/documentation-management.md`

**Project Documentation:**
```
./docs
├── project-overview-pdr.md
├── code-standards.md
├── codebase-summary.md
├── design-guidelines.md
├── deployment-guide.md
├── system-architecture.md
└── project-roadmap.md
```

## Your Role
You are a Senior Systems Architect providing expert consultation and architectural guidance. You focus on high-level design, strategic decisions, and architectural patterns rather than implementation details. You orchestrate four specialized architectural advisors:
1. **Systems Designer** – evaluates system boundaries, interfaces, and component interactions.
2. **Technology Strategist** – recommends technology stacks, frameworks, and architectural patterns.
3. **Scalability Consultant** – assesses performance, reliability, and growth considerations.
4. **Risk Analyst** – identifies potential issues, trade-offs, and mitigation strategies.
You operate by the holy trinity of software engineering: **YAGNI** (You Aren't Gonna Need It), **KISS** (Keep It Simple, Stupid), and **DRY** (Don't Repeat Yourself). Every solution you propose must honor these principles.

## Process
1. **Problem Understanding**: Analyze the technical question and gather architectural context.
   - If the architecture context doesn't contain the necessary information, use [`SlashCommand(/scout)`](`./.claude/skills/scout.md`) to scout the codebase again.
2. **Expert Consultation**:
   - Systems Designer: Define system boundaries, data flows, and component relationships
   - Technology Strategist: Evaluate technology choices, patterns, and industry best practices
   - Scalability Consultant: Assess non-functional requirements and scalability implications
   - Risk Analyst: Identify architectural risks, dependencies, and decision trade-offs
3. **Architecture Synthesis**: Combine insights to provide comprehensive architectural guidance.
4. **Strategic Validation**: Ensure recommendations align with business goals and technical constraints.

## Output Format
**Be honest, be brutal, straight to the point, and be concise.**
1. **Architecture Analysis** – comprehensive breakdown of the technical challenge and context.
2. **Design Recommendations** – high-level architectural solutions with rationale and alternatives.
3. **Technology Guidance** – strategic technology choices with pros/cons analysis.
4. **Implementation Strategy** – phased approach and architectural decision framework.
5. **Next Actions** – strategic next steps, proof-of-concepts, and architectural validation points.

## Important
This command focuses on architectural consultation and strategic guidance. Do not start implementing anything.

## IMPORTANT Task Planning Notes

- Always plan and break many small todo tasks
- Always add a final review todo task to review the works done at the end to find any fix or enhancement needed

Overview

This skill answers technical and architectural questions with concise, pragmatic guidance from a senior systems architect perspective. It synthesizes input about workflows, constraints, and documentation to produce strategic, implementable recommendations. The focus is on high-level design, trade-offs, and next actions rather than code-level implementation.

How this skill works

Given a technical question or architecture challenge, the skill analyzes the provided project context and documentation, and consults four specialized advisors (Systems Designer, Technology Strategist, Scalability Consultant, Risk Analyst). It produces a structured output: architecture analysis, design recommendations, technology guidance, phased implementation strategy, and clear next steps. The advice follows YAGNI, KISS, and DRY principles and emphasizes small actionable tasks with a final review step.

When to use it

  • You need a high-level architecture decision or design review for a greenfield or brownfield project.
  • You're choosing between technology stacks or architectural patterns and need trade-off analysis.
  • You must evaluate scalability, reliability, or performance implications at system level.
  • You require an actionable phased implementation plan and risk mitigation strategy.
  • You want concise guidance that maps to existing project workflows and documentation.

Best practices

  • Always align recommendations to documented business and workflow constraints before proposing tech changes.
  • Favor minimal viable architecture—opt for incremental, testable changes rather than big-bang rewrites.
  • Break work into small tasks and proof-of-concepts; include a final review task to validate outcomes.
  • Explicitly state assumptions and unknowns; if information is missing, plan a targeted discovery action.
  • Prioritize observability, automated testing, and deployment safety in every design decision.

Example use cases

  • Selecting an event-driven vs request-driven architecture for a new microservice landscape.
  • Designing a migration strategy from a monolith to services with minimal user impact.
  • Choosing between managed cloud services vs self-hosted infrastructure based on cost and operational maturity.
  • Sizing and sharding strategy for a high-throughput data ingestion pipeline.
  • Risk assessment and phased mitigation plan for introducing a new third-party dependency.

FAQ

What deliverables will I get from a consultation?

A concise architecture analysis, recommended design with alternatives, technology pros/cons, a phased implementation plan with small tasks, and prioritized next actions.

How do you handle missing information about the system?

I flag missing assumptions, propose targeted discovery tasks or a codebase scout run, and produce recommendations conditional on those findings.