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design-standards skill

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This skill helps evaluate design proposals for compliance with coding, architectural, and organizational standards to ensure consistency with existing patterns.

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SKILL.md

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---
name: design-standards
description: >-
  Standards compliance design analysis. Apply when evaluating design proposals
  for coding standards, architectural guidelines, organizational conventions,
  and consistency with existing patterns.
user-invocable: false
---

# Standards Keeper Perspective

Evaluate design proposals for compliance with established standards and conventions.

## Analysis Checklist

### Coding Standards
- Verify that the design follows project naming conventions and style guides
- Check that code organization matches established module structure
- Assess whether documentation standards are met for public interfaces
- Look for deviations from agreed error handling and logging patterns
- Confirm that test structure and coverage requirements are addressed

### Architectural Guidelines
- Check that the design respects established layer boundaries
- Verify that communication patterns match the agreed architecture style
- Assess whether new dependencies align with the approved technology stack
- Look for violations of dependency direction rules

### Organizational Conventions
- Verify that the design follows team-agreed review and approval processes
- Check that configuration management practices are maintained
- Assess whether deployment conventions and environment parity are preserved
- Look for deviations from established branching and release strategies

### Consistency Verification
- Compare the proposal against existing similar implementations in the codebase
- Check that shared utilities and libraries are reused rather than duplicated
- Verify that API response formats and error codes are consistent
- Assess whether the design introduces conflicting patterns

## Output Format

Report findings with strength ratings:

| Strength | Description |
|----------|-------------|
| Strong | Fully compliant with all applicable standards |
| Moderate | Mostly compliant with minor deviations justified |
| Weak | Significant standards violations or inconsistencies |
| Neutral | No applicable standards defined for this area |

Overview

This skill evaluates design proposals for compliance with coding standards, architectural guidelines, organizational conventions, and consistency with existing patterns. It produces a clear, actionable report that rates strength of compliance and highlights required changes. The goal is to make review decisions faster and reduce regression from inconsistent designs.

How this skill works

The skill inspects designs against a checklist: naming and style, module organization, documentation, error handling, test coverage, layer boundaries, dependency rules, and deployment practices. It compares proposals to existing implementations to detect duplication or conflicting patterns. Findings are summarized with a strength rating (Strong, Moderate, Weak, Neutral) and concise remediation suggestions.

When to use it

During design review before implementation starts
When approving architectural changes or introducing new dependencies
To validate cross-team proposals against organizational conventions
When merging large feature branches to ensure consistency
As part of periodic audits to enforce long-term standards

Best practices

Run the analysis early to catch directional violations before coding
Include concrete examples of inconsistent code or architecture in findings
Prioritize changes that prevent repeated anti-patterns across the codebase
Flag deviations that require policy updates versus those needing local fixes
Require justification for any accepted deviation and document the decision

Example use cases

Reviewing a microservice design to ensure it respects layer boundaries and approved communication patterns
Evaluating a proposal that adds a third-party library to verify it aligns with the tech stack and dependency rules
Assessing a refactor plan to confirm tests, logging, and error handling follow project conventions
Checking a cross-team API change for consistent response formats and shared utility reuse
Auditing branch and release strategy compliance before a major rollout

FAQ

What does each strength rating mean?

Strong means fully compliant; Moderate indicates minor deviations with justification; Weak signifies significant violations needing remediation; Neutral means no standards apply.

How specific are remediation suggestions?

Suggestions are concise and actionable: they identify the violated guideline, show the impact, and recommend a fix or further review steps.