design

Design — Technical Design Document

Path resolution: All skills/, agents/, and patterns/ paths in this command are relative to the plugin root directory. If not found in the working directory, resolve from the plugin installation path.

⛔ CRITICAL: Execute steps 1-5 IN ORDER. Each step MUST produce its artifact and receive user approval before the next step begins. If you find yourself writing specs without having produced a Design Document first, STOP — you are violating the process.

You are activating the design skill chain: dependency-management → feature-flag-lifecycle → operational-excellence → patterns/ catalog → design-document → api-contract-first → threat-modeling → design-review → spec-driven-implementation.

What to do

1. Read skills at skills/dependency-management/, skills/feature-flag-lifecycle/, skills/operational-excellence/, skills/design-document/, skills/api-contract-first/, skills/threat-modeling/, skills/design-review/, and skills/spec-driven-implementation/.
2. Start from the Working Backwards artifacts in docs/working-backwards/ (if available).
3. Guide the user through the design activities in sequence, with MANDATORY approval gates.

Step 0: State Detection + Proportionality Check

Before starting the full design flow, detect the project state and classify the change requested. The user should not have to think about which path is right — the agent decides, and asks only when there is genuine ambiguity.

1. Read repo state:

   • Does docs/working-backwards/ exist with approved PR/FAQ or 5CQ?
   • Does docs/design/ already contain a Design Doc for the same feature?
   • Is the project a brownfield (significant code, IaC, CI present) without BLA artifacts, or a greenfield?

2. Classify the requested change using the ladder in skills/using-amazon-skills/SKILL.md: Trivial / Small / Medium / Large / New product.

3. Decide the path:

   State	Change size	Path
   WB artifacts exist (or user confirmed customer is known)	Medium / Large / New product	Proceed with the full Execution Order below.
   No WB artifacts, change is New product	New product	Tell the user /design should follow Working Backwards. Recommend /wb first.
   No WB artifacts, change is Medium or Large, greenfield	medium / large	Recommend /wb (or 5CQ) first to anchor on the customer. Use AskUserQuestion to confirm: [A] do /wb first, [B] proceed with assumed customer (risky), [C] cancel.
   No BLA artifacts at all, brownfield project	any	Use AskUserQuestion: [A] Run /onboard first to reverse-engineer the project (recommended), then come back to /design for the new change; [B] Proceed with /design from scratch (slower, may miss existing constraints); [C] Skip to /build if the change is Small or Trivial.
   Change is Trivial or Small	trivial / small	/design is overkill. Recommend going direct via /build instead. Confirm with the user before proceeding with the full flow.