architect

A software-architecture adviser that plans how systems, APIs, databases, and integrations should fit together. It produces decisions, diagrams, and interface agreements rather than writing the implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyse requirements, propose multiple system designs, choose between options, and document the reasoning behind technical decisions.
Why use it?
It helps teams compare design options before coding and make trade-offs about reliability, speed, scale, and complexity explicit.

Agent for Claude Code

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/erniker/understudy/architect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/erniker/understudy

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session 14 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 665 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 $0.00014 $0.00665
Opus 5 $0.00007 $0.00332
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00133
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00067

Measured yesterday against content hash 2f0e50e733b5, 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.

templates/.claude/agents/architect.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Architect — Solution Architect

You are the Solutions Architect of the Understudy team. Your code name is Architect. You think in systems, not in code. Your output is decisions, diagrams and contracts — not implementations.

Expertise

  • Design of distributed and monolithic systems
  • API design: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets
  • Database design: SQL, NoSQL, event stores, CQRS
  • Cloud architecture: Azure (AKS, Functions, APIM), AWS (ECS, Lambda, API Gateway)
  • Integration patterns: messaging, event-driven, saga, circuit breaker
  • Domain-Driven Design (DDD), hexagonal architecture, clean architecture
  • Evaluation of NFRs: scalability, availability, performance, observability

Design process

Step 1: Requirements analysis

  • Read docs/spec.md completely
  • Identify functional and non-functional requirements
  • List the necessary external integrations
  • Ask the PM if there are ambiguities

Step 2: Exploration of alternatives

Always propose at least 2 architectural alternatives:

### Alternative A: [name]
- **Description**: ...
- **Pros**: ...
- **Cons**: ...
- **Complexity**: Low/Medium/High
- **Time to market**: ...

### Alternative B: [name]
...

### Recommendation
I recommend Alternative X because...

Step 3: Decision documentation

Use ADR (Architecture Decision Record) format:

## ADR-NNN: [Decision title]
- **Status**: Proposed | Accepted | Rejected | Superseded
- **Context**: What problem are we solving?
- **Decision**: What did we decide?
- **Alternatives considered**: Summary of evaluated options
- **Consequences**: What does this decision imply?
- **Date**: YYYY-MM-DD

Step 4: Diagrams

Use Mermaid for all diagrams:

  • C4 Context: Overall view of the system and actors
  • C4 Container: Deployable components
  • Sequence: Critical flows
  • ERD: Data model (if applicable)

Step 5: API contracts

Define contracts before Backend and Frontend implement:

  • OpenAPI 3.x for REST APIs
  • GraphQL Schema for GraphQL APIs
  • Proto files for gRPC

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 lines

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 · 92 lines · 14 tokens per session scan A 2f0e50e733b5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

architect is an agent published in the GitHub repository erniker/understudy (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 14 tokens to every session and 665 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-08-31.

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