well-architected

well-architected is a skill for Claude Code from avelikiy/great_cto. It costs 60 tokens per session (1,608 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An architecture review guide based on six areas: operations, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability. It gives teams questions to answer before shipping a non-trivial software project.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for reviewing architecture documents and planning how software will be deployed, monitored, secured, operated, and maintained.
Why use it?
It prevents important production concerns, such as monitoring, rollback plans, trust boundaries, and failure handling, from being left until later.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the great-cto plugin — 40 skills, 44 commands, 70 agents shipped together

Good fit It is for reviewing architecture documents and planning how software will be deployed, monitored, secured, operated, and maintained.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/avelikiy/great_cto/well-architected
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 avelikiy/great_cto --skill well-architected
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/avelikiy/great_cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install great-cto, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 40 skills, 44 commands, 70 agents.

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 well-architected

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/well-architected/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/well-architected)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/well-architected"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/well-architected/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for well-architected

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/well-architected"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/well-architected.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,608 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00060 $0.01608
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00804
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00322
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00161

Measured 7d ago against content hash 81c72d1869ab, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

well-architected 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.

skills/well-architected/SKILL.md · 202 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 202 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Well-Architected — 6 pillars to verify before shipping

Every ARCH document for non-nano work must answer the 6 pillar questions below. Skipping a pillar is allowed only if explicitly justified (e.g. "Sustainability: N/A — backend-only, runs in shared infra.").

This is adapted from AWS Well-Architected (lens: small-team SaaS / LLM applications), trimmed to questions that matter at <10 engineer scale.

Pillar 1 — Operational excellence

Questions

  1. Observability: What metrics, logs, traces do we emit? How do we tell from a dashboard if this is working in prod?
  2. Deployability: How do we ship a change? CI gates? Rollback path?
  3. Runbooks: When this breaks at 3am, what does on-call read?

Pass criteria

  • ✅ One metric per business outcome (e.g. webhook-deliveries-acked)
  • ✅ One log line per request, with request-id correlatable across services
  • ✅ Deploy path is documented and tested (rollback dry-run executed)
  • ✅ Runbook covers top-3 failure modes from pre-mortem

Common fail

❌ "We'll add monitoring later." Monitoring is part of the feature.

Pillar 2 — Security

Questions

  1. Trust boundaries: Where does untrusted data enter? How is it validated/sanitized?
  2. Authn / authz: Who can call this? Who can read/write the data?
  3. Secrets: Where are API keys, DB passwords, JWT signing keys stored?
  4. Data classification: PII? PHI? PCI cardholder data? What's the retention policy?

Pass criteria

  • ✅ Every external input has explicit validation at the boundary
  • ✅ Authz is enforced at the data layer, not just UI
  • ✅ Secrets in env vars or secret manager, never in source
  • ✅ Sensitive data classified and retention policy defined

Common fail

❌ "JWT validates the user, that's our authz." JWT is authentication. Authorization is separate (this user can read THIS row).

Pillar 3 — Reliability

Questions

  1. Failure modes: What happens when a downstream dependency is slow / down / corrupted?
  2. Idempotency: Can a retried request safely re-execute?
  3. Backups & recovery: What's the RPO (data-loss tolerance)? RTO (downtime tolerance)? Test plan for both?
  4. Capacity: What's the max QPS this can handle? What happens at 1.5x that?

Read the full file on GitHub · 202 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 · 202 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A 81c72d1869ab

Subscribe to this mod's changes

well-architected is a skill published in the GitHub repository avelikiy/great_cto (92 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 1,608 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 2026-09-03.

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