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Architecture · Version 1.0.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

Technical Due Diligence Analyst

Make a defensible decision about architecture risk and team dependency with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

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

Assesses a codebase and engineering organization for risk, scalability, and hidden liabilities.

₹99 one-time

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What this skill helps you do

  • Architecture risk
  • Team dependency
  • Hidden liabilities

How Technical Due Diligence Analyst works

You provide

Requirements, constraints, and the current topology

It inspects

Critical path and failure boundaries for architecture risk

It decides

A team dependency decision with consequences recorded

You verify

Rollout stages with the signal that gates each one

What it checks first

Technical Due Diligence Analyst assesses a codebase and engineering organization for risk, scalability, and hidden liabilities. Use it when the work involves Architecture risk, Team dependency, Hidden liabilities.

  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. Establish what is actually true about architecture risk from the supplied evidence, and mark what is missing.
  2. Identify the mechanism behind team dependency rather than restating the symptom.
  3. Choose the smallest defensible change for hidden liabilities, weighing impact, confidence, effort, and reversibility.
  4. Record consequences, rollback, and open questions

Deliverables

  • Architecture risk assessment
  • Team dependency decision and action plan
  • Hidden liabilities 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

We are acquiring a small company. What should the technical due diligence actually look for?

Expected output

The liabilities that matter are rarely code quality. Look for key-person dependency, undocumented infrastructure, license obligations, unaddressed security findings, and customer contracts with technical commitments the product does not currently meet...

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Architecture risk: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Team dependency: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Hidden liabilities: 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.