architect

architect is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ApexIQ/skillsmith. It costs 33 tokens per session (1,869 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A framework for making system design decisions, such as choosing service boundaries, databases, or a monolith versus multiple services.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to gather requirements, compare architecture options, plan scaling, and document important technical decisions.
Why use it?
It makes tradeoffs explicit before they become expensive problems in production.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to gather requirements, compare architecture options, plan scaling, and document important technical decisions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/apexiq/skillsmith/architect
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.

Any agent
npx skills add ApexIQ/skillsmith --skill architect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ApexIQ/skillsmith

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for architect

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/apexiq/skillsmith/architect.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/apexiq/skillsmith/architect)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/apexiq/skillsmith/architect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/apexiq/skillsmith/architect.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,869 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00033 $0.01869
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00934
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00374
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00187

Measured 7d ago against content hash 46bc526e931e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, 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 7d ago.

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.

.agent/skills/architect/SKILL.md · 184 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 184 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

🏗️ Architect — System Design Decisions

Philosophy: Architecture is the set of decisions you wish you could get right early. Every design choice is a tradeoff — name the tradeoff explicitly or you'll discover it in production.

1. When to Use This Skill

  • Designing a new system or service from scratch
  • Choosing between architectural patterns (monolith vs microservices, etc.)
  • Making database or infrastructure decisions
  • Defining API contracts and service boundaries
  • Evaluating build-vs-buy decisions
  • Scaling an existing system

2. The Architecture Decision Framework

Step 1: Context Gathering

Before designing, answer these questions:

Category Questions
Users Who uses this? How many concurrent? Growth rate?
Data How much data? Read-heavy or write-heavy? Consistency requirements?
Reliability What's the cost of downtime? Required uptime SLA?
Team How many engineers? What expertise exists?
Timeline MVP deadline? When does it need to scale?
Budget Cloud spend constraints? Licensing constraints?

Step 2: Architecture Decision Record (ADR)

For every significant decision, write an ADR:

# ADR-001: Use PostgreSQL over MongoDB for User Data

## Status: Accepted
## Date: 2026-03-25

## Context
We need a database for user data with complex relationships (users → teams → projects → permissions). Expected scale: 100K users in Year 1, 1M in Year 3.

## Decision
Use PostgreSQL with row-level security.

## Tradeoffs Considered
| Option | Pros | Cons |
|--------|------|------|
| PostgreSQL | ACID, relations, mature, RLS | Horizontal scaling harder |
| MongoDB | Flexible schema, easy horizontal | No joins, consistency tradeoffs |
| DynamoDB | Infinite scale, serverless | Vendor lock-in, complex queries expensive |

## Consequences
- ✅ Strong consistency guarantees for permission checks
- ✅ Team has PostgreSQL experience
- ⚠️ Will need read replicas at ~500K users
- ⚠️ Schema migrations require coordination

## Review Date: 2026-09-25

Read the full file on GitHub · 184 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. 7d ago First seen · 184 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 46bc526e931e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

architect is a skill published in the GitHub repository ApexIQ/skillsmith (5 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,869 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.