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design-code-architecture

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Guided journey from an app idea to a deliberate architecture: boundaries, domain model, data decisions, and resilience, making only the expensive-to-reverse decisions and deferring the rest. Orchestrates eight skills phase by phase - clean-architecture, domain-driven-design, system-design, ddia-systems, software-design-philosophy, release-it, pragmatic-programmer, 37signals-way - asking the user questions at every decision point and recording results in the project docs/ folder (ARCHITECTURE.md, DESIGN-CODE-ARCHITECTURE-PLAN.md) so the journey resumes across sessions. Use when the user wants to design a new app's architecture, choose boundaries and a domain model, decide monolith versus microservices, or says 'how should I structure this app'. If a codebase already exists, use remove-technical-debt (aged), improve-code-quality (fresh prototype), or architecture-optimization (slow but working); if unvalidated, run create-business or create-app first. For one framework in isolation, invoke that skill directly.

design-code-architecture/SKILL.md

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# Design Code Architecture

Design the architecture for a new app: get the small number of expensive-to-reverse decisions right and stay aggressively simple everywhere else. This is an interactive, resumable journey of eight phases — the agent asks before every decision and records the outcome in your project's `docs/` folder, so you can stop after any phase and resume later. It runs from the most foundational and hardest-to-reverse (boundaries, domain) through the tunable (data, resilience) to the cross-cutting disciplines (complexity, reversibility, scope) you apply throughout. A weekend project uses three phases lightly; a funded team building toward launch wants the whole stack.

## Core Principle

**Architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to reverse: make exactly those deliberately, and defer everything cheap.** This skill sequences the phases, asks the decision questions, and records every choice in `docs/`. The constituent skills carry the method — invoke them rather than improvising their frameworks. The whole strategy is to convert expensive decisions into cheap ones by putting a boundary in front of them, so the irreducibly expensive set stays small enough to get right with care.

## Journey Map

| Phase | Skill | Question it answers | Artifact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | clean-architecture | Do source-code dependencies point inward — is the core testable with no DB, web, or framework? | Creates docs/ARCHITECTURE.md |
| 2 | domain-driven-design | Where does the business actually split, and what does each term mean? | Extends docs/ARCHITECTURE.md |
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