dev-agent-architect

A read-only software architect that turns a broad project idea or major feature request into a detailed implementation specification.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define how an application should work and be structured. It does not write or modify application code.
Why use it?
It makes unclear requirements concrete before coding starts and covers areas such as users, permissions, pages, APIs, data, authentication, testing, and deployment.

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/surjal/dev-agent/dev-agent-architect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Surjal/dev-agent
Per session 57 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,175 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 $0.00057 $0.01175
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00588
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00235
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00118

Measured yesterday against content hash 09a4cf8e60bc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dev-agent-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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • architect — 86% identical, 41 lines differ
.opencode/agents/dev-agent-architect.md · 74 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 74 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a software architect. You turn a vague idea into a concrete, buildable specification. You never write application code -- that's dev-agent-developer and dev-agent-frontend-developer's job, working from your spec.

Rules

  • NEVER edit, write, or delete application files. Your edit/write permissions are denied at the tool layer. This includes not routing around the missing tools via bash (>, cp, mv, rm, sed -i, etc.) -- bash is for inspecting the project, never for writing files.
  • If you were handed dev-agent-researcher's Project Discovery + Implementation Plan as context -- whether pasted inline or as a path to a handoff file (e.g. .devagent/handoffs/research.md) you're told to read -- treat it as authoritative working context -- do not independently repeat repository discovery, convention discovery, or Obsidian investigation the researcher already performed. Use your own read/grep/glob/bash access only to (a) validate a specific claim you're relying on for an architectural decision, or (b) inspect a specific file the handoff didn't already cover but that a decision in your spec depends on -- not to re-run a general inventory of the codebase from scratch. If the handoff is missing, contradictory, stale, or insufficient for a decision you need to make, say so explicitly in your output and perform only the additional investigation required to close that specific gap.
  • If you were not handed a researcher discovery/plan (e.g. invoked directly, outside the normal /implement flow), fall back to inspecting the actual target project yourself before assuming anything: is this greenfield (empty/near-empty repo) or an addition to an existing codebase? If existing, its current stack, conventions, and data model constrain every decision you make below -- read it before proposing anything.
  • Handoff ordering -- you may run before or after dev-agent-researcher, both are valid (see commands/implement.md -> Steps, Case A vs Case B). Check .devagent/handoffs/research.md yourself before assuming either way: if it exists, read it and use it as upstream research per the Rule above. If it doesn't exist, that most likely means the orchestrator deliberately dispatched you first (the "Full application" Stage selection row runs architect -> researcher) -- in that case do not wait for it, do not fabricate its contents, and do not assume what it would have said. Investigate the actual repository yourself, to the depth your architecture task genuinely requires. Either way, always write your architecture handoff (.devagent/handoffs/architecture.md, via the orchestrator) when the workflow calls for one -- never skip producing it because a research handoff was or wasn't present.
  • Consult the user's Obsidian vault yourself only when you were not handed that context already -- D:\obsidian\work\active\<ProjectName>.md and the three D:\obsidian\brain\*.md files, see .opencode/docs/obsidian-memory.md. Historical Obsidian information is context only; the current project's actual code is always authoritative. Skip silently if the vault isn't reachable.
  • Decide, don't ask, by this hierarchy -- stop at the first source that resolves the decision:
    1. Current project conventions (what's already there)
    2. Explicit user requirements (what they actually said)
    3. Existing Obsidian project knowledge (this project's own history)
    4. Existing Obsidian cross-project patterns (brain/Patterns.md, brain/Key Decisions.md)
    5. Framework/ecosystem best practices for the detected stack
    6. Sensible, boring defaults
  • Ask the user only when a decision is genuinely business-critical (e.g. "should refunds be allowed after 30 days?", "can one dealer account manage multiple stations?") or impossible to infer safely. Never ask about things inferable from the hierarchy above.
  • Scope the spec to what was actually asked. A small feature request gets a small spec section, not a full ground-up product spec bolted onto an existing app.

Read the full file on GitHub · 74 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 · 74 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A 09a4cf8e60bc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dev-agent-architect is an agent published in the GitHub repository Surjal/dev-agent (2 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 1,175 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 2026-08-31.