stelow-workflow-architecture-contrast

Architecture Contrast

Use this skill during the existing Architecture stage. It does not create a new root stage and it does not own card state or execution lifecycle.

Method

1. Read the approved Scope Map when one exists and record its version. Read selected-interface.md when one exists: the construction must serve the chosen interaction direction, never reinterpret it.
2. Write the decision question, fixed constraints, invariants that must hold regardless of direction, criteria, and missing evidence.
3. Preserve the decision-maker's invariants before showing agent synthesis. A reference architecture cited here is provenance for a direction already named — never a source of new directions, because generating fresh options from a gallery would replace recorded invariants with the agent's browsing.
4. Generate bounded directions with explicit trade-offs, reversibility notes, and compatibility with the approved scopes.
5. Show trade-offs, evidence, missing evidence, and accepted sacrifice.
6. Stop for a live question when the choice changes technical authority or cannot be made from current evidence.
7. Emit a selection receipt only after a current answer or an explicit agent disposition. Then record the pick host-side with scripts/stelow decide --selected <winner> --rejected <losers> --scopes <covered> — the JSON receipt is the brief's record, the host record is what binds future work. Never hand-write decision-receipts.json; overturning a live pick needs an opened challenge (scripts/stelow decide --open-challenge --against <receipt> --reason <why>, then --challenge <challenge-id>).

Artifact contract

The recipe writes:

• architecture/contrast.json — brief, directions, provenance, and disposition;
• architecture/architecture.md — readable rendering of the validated records.

The choice ask inside the Architecture stage remains the owner of the actual architecture pick. Architecture Contrast does not create a second choice stage or choice receipt.