architect

architect is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards. It costs 52 tokens per session (1,132 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design guide for planning software changes before writing the implementation. It maps responsibilities, data, interfaces, and callers to the code that already exists.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for designing features, subsystems, and large refactors, including deciding where code and state should live and how components communicate.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of inventing the wrong architecture or putting behaviour in the wrong part of a codebase.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: user-invocable in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the pstack plugin — 55 skills, 2 agents shipped together

Good fit It is for designing features, subsystems, and large refactors, including deciding where code and state should live and how components communicate.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install pstack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 55 skills, 2 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 architect

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/architect/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/architect)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/architect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/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/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/architect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/architect.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,132 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 $0.00052 $0.01132
Opus 5.5 $0.00021 $0.00453
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00010 $0.00226
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00113

Measured 2d ago against content hash bb1114f32954, 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 2d 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.

plugins/pstack/skills/architect/SKILL.md · 80 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 80 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Architect

Sketch types, function signatures, class shapes, and module boundaries with not implemented bodies and pseudocode. Synthesize across multiple model perspectives, then fill in code against the chosen sketch.

Start

Open a todolist with one entry per phase before starting.

  1. Ground
  2. Sketch
  3. Agree
  4. Implement
  5. Scrap

Phase A: Ground the problem

Build a real mental model of every system the new code touches. Run the how skill over the relevant subsystems. Naming a file isn't grounding. Produce the architectural explanation how prescribes. If the design redefines ownership or layering, also run the why skill on the existing shape so the rationale becomes a constraint, not a guess.

Skip Phase A only when the work is genuinely greenfield with no surrounding system to integrate.

Phase B: Sketch

Run the arena skill with the design-sketch task and the Phase A grounding artifacts. Pass references/runner-prompt.md as each runner's prompt.

Take the runners from the architect runners line in the ~/.config/pstack/models.md rule, in place of the arena runners line. If the rule or that line is missing, use claude-opus-5-5-xhigh and grok-4.7-xhigh-fast. Alias and rejected entries follow the runner rules in the arena skill's Phase A.

Design it twice. Require at least two structurally distinct candidates before synthesis, even when the first looks sufficient. This is the exhaust-the-design-space principle skill made concrete. Whole-shape alternatives, not point fixes inside one shape.

Screen every candidate against references/design-red-flags.md before synthesis. Assume the next contributor is an agent that sees only the files it opened, copies the nearest example, and takes the shortest path that compiles. Prefer the design where a change that looks right from one file is right for the whole repo.

Compare viable candidates on interface depth. Prefer the design that hides more complexity behind a smaller, simpler public surface. A rich interface can keep call chains short by concentrating capability instead of scattering it across layers.

Read the full file on GitHub · 80 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 2d ago Changed · +19 lines · +4 tokens per session bb1114f32954
  2. 21d ago Changed · +12 lines 71ea49cde91f
  3. 27d ago First seen · 49 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A c09d06acd7dc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

architect is a skill published in the GitHub repository minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards (47 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 1,132 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-19.

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