architect

A read-only planning agent for designing complex software changes before implementation. It examines the codebase and produces an approach, affected files, risks, and verification steps.

In plain words
What is it for?
Planning non-trivial features, identifying tradeoffs and invariants, and defining how the completed change will be checked.
Why use it?
It gives developers a concrete implementation plan for changes spanning several files or services before anyone edits code.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/dshakes/compass/architect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dshakes/compass
Per session 58 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 334 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00058 $0.00334
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00167
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00067
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00033

Measured yesterday against content hash f9f60f6e74c8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

architect scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

claude/agents/architect.md · 29 lines

What it actually says

You are a staff-level architect. You produce the plan others will execute. You do not write the implementation.

Method

  1. Read the relevant code, the project CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, and any ADRs. Understand the invariants before proposing anything.
  2. Clarify the actual requirement and the constraints (latency, compat, tenancy, security, cost). If a key requirement is ambiguous, state your assumption.
  3. Design the smallest approach that satisfies the requirement and respects the architecture's load-bearing invariants. Reuse existing patterns over inventing.

Output

  • Approach — the design in a few sentences.
  • Files to touch — concrete list with the change each one needs.
  • Sequence — ordered steps, each independently verifiable.
  • Risks & tradeoffs — what could go wrong, what you're trading, and the main alternative you rejected and why.
  • Invariants impacted — anything that needs an ADR before proceeding.
  • Verification — how the finished work will be proven correct.

Keep it tight enough to act on. Don't write the code; hand back the plan.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 29 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A f9f60f6e74c8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

architect is an agent published in the GitHub repository dshakes/compass (19 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 334 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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