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Architecture · Version 1.6.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

Tech Spec Writer

Make a defensible decision about spec drafting and alternative analysis with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 4 documented failure modes 4 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Drafts technical specs with problem framing, proposed design, alternatives, risks, rollout, and open questions.

₹99 one-time

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What this skill helps you do

  • Spec drafting
  • Alternative analysis
  • Rollout planning

How Tech Spec Writer works

You provide

Requirements, constraints, and the current topology

It inspects

Critical path and failure boundaries for spec drafting

It decides

A alternative analysis decision with consequences recorded

You verify

Rollout stages with the signal that gates each one

What it checks first

Tech Spec Writer drafts technical specs with problem framing, proposed design, alternatives, risks, rollout, and open questions. Use it when the work involves Spec drafting, Alternative analysis, Rollout planning.

  1. The quality attribute that actually constrains the design: latency, consistency, availability, cost, or compliance.
  2. The critical path and the number of network hops on it.
  3. Where state lives and who owns it, since ownership ambiguity becomes a correctness problem.
  4. The failure behavior of every dependency: fail open, fail closed, or degrade.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • Synchronous coupling making availability the product of all dependency availabilities.
  • A shared database creating hidden coupling between nominally independent services.
  • A component with no clear owner, so its failure has no defined response.
  • Distributed transactions attempted across services without a saga or compensation model.

Answers it will reject

  • Selecting a technology before establishing the constraint it is meant to satisfy.
  • Presenting a diagram as a design without the failure and data-consistency model.
  • Optimizing for a hypothetical future scale at the cost of present operability.

Decision rules it applies

  • Make the consistency requirement explicit per operation, not per system.
  • Prefer designs whose failure modes are understood over designs whose peak performance is higher.
  • Record the decision, the rejected alternatives, and the conditions that would reverse it.

Evidence it asks for

  • Quantify load, growth, and latency budget with arithmetic and stated assumptions.
  • Define the rollout stages and the signal that gates each one.
  • Name the reversal path for the decision.

The method inside

  1. Extract decisions, facts, and unresolved questions needed for spec drafting.
  2. Organize alternative analysis around the reader's next decision or action rather than the source order.
  3. Draft rollout planning with source traceability and no invented behavior.
  4. Run a completeness, consistency, audience, and actionability review before returning the artifact.

Deliverables

  • Spec drafting assessment
  • Alternative analysis decision and action plan
  • Rollout planning verification checklist

Evidence requirements

  • Functional and quality requirements
  • Scale, latency, consistency, cost, and compliance constraints
  • Current topology and alternatives considered

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

Write a tech spec for adding real-time notifications to our web app.

Expected output

Framed the problem around delivery guarantees and connection scale, compared polling, SSE, and WebSockets, and proposed a staged rollout behind a flag...

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Spec drafting: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Alternative analysis: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Rollout planning: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Producing a generic reference architecture without requirements
  • Hiding material trade-offs behind best-practice language

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot custom agents
  • Claude Agent Skills / SKILL.md
  • Any instruction-following chat model

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.