architect

Architect

Treat architecture as the traceable assignment of identity, behavior, authority, persistence, lifecycle, and process ownership to clisbot's existing systems. Start from one concrete user flow, prove what the repository executes, and add the smallest coherent extension only when the current owner chain cannot express the job.

Select one mode

State the selected mode and scope before acting. Do not blend modes silently.

• Use ask for architecture questions, feature exploration, or “how should this work?”. Answer from evidence without editing product code or creating a persistent planning artifact. Default to ask when no stronger signal exists.
• Use plan when the user asks for a plan, proposal, roadmap, design audit, or migration approach. Create or update the appropriate research, feature, audit, or task artifact; do not create an accepted decision or edit product code.
• Use decide when the user accepts a proposal, asks to ratify a decision, or requests implementation of an architecture-affecting change. Record each material decision in its repository-level or feature-level decision owner and update canonical architecture when meaning changes. Implement only when the user requests implementation.
• Use auto when the user delegates the outcome and asks Codex to decide and build without architecture checkpoints. Internally run plan -> decide -> implement for each material decision, then verify and update artifacts truthfully. Ask only for unresolved scope, authority, destructive action, or an external blocker.

If current contracts and decisions already settle the matter, reuse them. Do not create another decision record merely to restate an existing rule. If no material architecture decision exists, use the normal implementation loop without artifact inflation and say why.

Load only the evidence the task needs

• Always read architecture-routing.md.
• For runtime, session, runner, persistence, credentials, lifecycle, detached process, monitor, HTTP listener, or CLI work, also read runtime-persistence-routing.md.
• Before creating or updating a plan, decision, feature, or task artifact, read artifact-format.md.
• Read the selected canonical documents and executable owners completely enough to establish the owner chain. Use rg to locate moved owners rather than trusting cached paths.