architect

What This Skill Does

The Architect skill acts as your senior-level system design partner, specialized in building, maintaining, and documenting complex technical architectures. It ensures your projects follow industry-standard practices, such as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), C4 diagramming, and modular design. The skill excels at trade-off analysis, preventing technical debt through structured decision-making processes, and acting as an orchestrator for other technical skills within the OpenClaw ecosystem.

Installation

You can install the skill via the OpenClaw hub CLI: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/anton-abyzov/sw-architect Ensure you have your workspace initialized, as the skill relies on specific file structures within .specweave/docs/internal/architecture/ to persist your project designs.

Use Cases

• Project Initialization: Use this when you are starting a new project and need to define the foundational system architecture and select appropriate technology stacks.
• Technical Documentation: Ideal for creating persistent ADRs to record the rationale behind major technical shifts or to provide context for new team members.
• Component Planning: Useful for decomposing monolithic applications into microservices, planning database structures, or mapping out communication patterns between services.
• Architectural Audits: Bring the architect into an existing codebase to identify potential bottlenecks, scalability issues, or architectural drift.

Example Prompts

1. "I am designing a real-time event processing system using Kafka and Node.js. Create an architectural overview and a list of necessary ADRs to start with."
2. "We need to decide between using a relational database versus a NoSQL store for our new user analytics platform. Can you perform a trade-off analysis and draft a formal ADR?"
3. "Draft a system diagram in C4 format for an e-commerce backend and then generate a plan.md file to track the implementation of these services."

Tips & Limitations

• Token Budget: Always keep your requests focused. The skill is designed for iterative work; do not attempt to solve an entire enterprise architecture in a single prompt. If you exceed 2000 tokens, the system will truncate the output, potentially losing critical design decisions.
• Progressive Disclosure: Utilize the suggested phases (Analysis, ADR Creation, Diagrams) in the order provided to ensure your project documentation remains consistent and easy to follow.
• Skill Chaining: Remember that this is an orchestrator skill. Use it to outline the requirements, but rely on specialized skills (like dotnet-backend or frontend-architect) for the heavy lifting of code generation. Always trigger the necessary domain skills after generating your plan.md.