architect

architect is a skill for Claude Code from donald-ada/workinggenius. It costs 80 tokens per session (2,246 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for deciding whether to build something or use an existing solution, then designing one architecture for the chosen approach. Architecture is the overall structure of a software system and how its parts fit together.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for new projects or major changes that shape a system's structure, especially when existing tools or services might already meet the need.
Why use it?
It reduces unfocused design debates and makes the reasons for building, adopting, or rejecting an approach explicit.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Part of the workinggenius plugin — 23 skills, 7 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it for new projects or major changes that shape a system's structure, especially when existing tools or services might already meet the need.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/donald-ada/workinggenius/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 donald-ada/workinggenius --skill architect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/donald-ada/workinggenius

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install workinggenius, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 23 skills, 7 agents, 1 hook.

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/donald-ada/workinggenius/architect/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/donald-ada/workinggenius/architect)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/donald-ada/workinggenius/architect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/donald-ada/workinggenius/architect/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 architect

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/donald-ada/workinggenius/architect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/donald-ada/workinggenius/architect.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,246 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 $0.00080 $0.02246
Opus 5.5 $0.00032 $0.00898
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00016 $0.00449
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00225

Measured 1mo ago against content hash c20777fb6b4b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, 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 1mo 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/architect/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Architect

Greenfield's territory is the field — the systems that already solved this problem — but the field answers one question and stress-tests another; it is not there to be copied. An architecture assembled from references is a worse copy of something the user could install, and one assembled from the default stack was designed for no problem at all.

The concept: first ask whether to build at all; then design one architecture that is genuinely yours, driven by the qualities the user actually ranks, and let the field and the future attack it. Architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to change later. Everything else is design, and belongs to the slices.

The discipline

  • Build-or-adopt is the first fork, and it belongs to the user. Does something existing cover this? Adopting — using, forking, wrapping — is a successful outcome. What justifies building is the delta between what the user needs and what exists: name it, put the fork to the user with your recommendation and its price, and if building wins, the delta is the design's spine — build only what differentiates. A claim about what an existing system does carries its source, because recall of a famous system is where invented facts come from.

  • Quality attributes are ranked, not listed. "Fast, reliable, cheap, simple" is a wish hiding which one it will drop. Ask which three matter most for this system, in order, each as a concrete scenario — "10× today's traffic on a Monday morning: what happens?" — because a quality with no scenario is a word, and words are never traded off. Every architectural decision names which quality it buys and which it spends.

  • Design one architecture, committed — never a menu. A row of reference-flavored options is theater when the user can't tell them apart. Design from your own understanding of the confirmed problem, at the professional default — a system a senior engineer expects to still be maintaining in three years — and stand behind it. Original decisions need reasons, not citations: the sourcing rule binds facts, never thinking. The default stack was chosen for no problem; a stack is a fork the user's world decides, so ask — the team's hands, the ops that exist, the load that is real. Every technology names what selected it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 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. 1mo ago Changed c20777fb6b4b
  2. 1mo ago Changed · -7 lines 503c2c1a16e8
  3. 2mo ago Changed · +82 lines · +23 tokens per session b0e3d7550c89
  4. 2mo ago First seen · 20 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A d3e60138e151

Subscribe to this mod's changes

architect is a skill published in the GitHub repository donald-ada/workinggenius (6 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 2,246 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.