Engineering

Skill 31 of 200

Architecture

Create or evaluate an architecture decision record (ADR).

1 minute · 166 words · 5 sections

Install

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill architecture

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

» /plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

If you see unfamiliar placeholders or need to check which tools are connected, see CONNECTORS.md (opens in a new tab).

Create an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) or evaluate a system design.

Usage

/architecture $ARGUMENTS

Modes

Create an ADR: “Should we use Kafka or SQS for our event bus?” Evaluate a design: “Review this microservices proposal” System design: “Design the notification system for our app”

See the system-design skill for detailed frameworks on requirements gathering, scalability analysis, and trade-off evaluation.

Output — ADR Format

# ADR-[number]: [Title]

**Status:** Proposed | Accepted | Deprecated | Superseded
**Date:** [Date]
**Deciders:** [Who needs to sign off]

## Context
[What is the situation? What forces are at play?]

## Decision
[What is the change we're proposing?]

## Options Considered

### Option A: [Name]
| Dimension | Assessment |
|-----------|------------|
| Complexity | [Low/Med/High] |
| Cost | [Assessment] |
| Scalability | [Assessment] |
| Team familiarity | [Assessment] |

**Pros:** [List]
**Cons:** [List]

### Option B: [Name]
[Same format]

## Trade-off Analysis
[Key trade-offs between options with clear reasoning]

## Consequences
- [What becomes easier]
- [What becomes harder]
- [What we'll need to revisit]

## Action Items
1. [ ] [Implementation step]
2. [ ] [Follow-up]

If Connectors Available

If ~~knowledge base is connected:

Search for prior ADRs and design docs
Find relevant technical context

If ~~project tracker is connected:

Link to related epics and tickets
Create implementation tasks

Tips

State constraints upfront — “We need to ship in 2 weeks” or “Must handle 10K rps” shapes the answer.
Name your options — Even if you’re leaning one way, I’ll give a more balanced analysis with explicit alternatives.
Include non-functional requirements — Latency, cost, team expertise, and maintenance burden matter as much as features.

About this skill

Trigger

Create or evaluate an architecture decision record (ADR). Use when choosing between technologies (e.g., Kafka vs SQS), documenting a design decision with trade-offs and consequences, reviewing a system design proposal, or designing a new component from requirements and constraints.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source

github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins, branch main, last pushed 23 September 2026.

Licence

Apache-2.0 — the text of every skill is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

200 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 27 distinct layouts observed: bio-research/skills/*/SKILL.md, cowork-plugin-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, customer-support/skills/*/SKILL.md, data/skills/*/SKILL.md, design/skills/*/SKILL.md, engineering/skills/*/SKILL.md, enterprise-search/skills/*/SKILL.md, finance/skills/*/SKILL.md, human-resources/skills/*/SKILL.md, legal/skills/*/SKILL.md, marketing/skills/*/SKILL.md, operations/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/apollo/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/brand-voice/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/common-room/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/slack/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/contact-center/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/web/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/video-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/virtual-agent/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/zoom-mcp/*/SKILL.md, pdf-viewer/skills/*/SKILL.md, product-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, productivity/skills/*/SKILL.md, sales/skills/*/SKILL.md.

Issue colours

Resolved from the awesome-design-md registry — hue 39°, chroma 0.113. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Typefaces

Display: Copernicus is not available to us; set in Newsreader.

We never load a typeface at request time from a third-party origin, so a brand face we do not already self-host is substituted rather than fetched.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Removed “/architecture”, a leading h1 that duplicated the skill title.

Spec compliance

53 editorial notes across 41 of 200 skills. They are printed in the margin of each skill rather than as errors here.

and 31 more.

Images

Images inside a skill come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Anthropic, declaring 120 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins.md, and each skill at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

If you see unfamiliar placeholders or need to check which tools are connected, see CONNECTORS.md (opens in a new tab).

Create an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) or evaluate a system design.

Usage

/architecture $ARGUMENTS

Modes

See the system-design skill for detailed frameworks on requirements gathering, scalability analysis, and trade-off evaluation.

Output — ADR Format

# ADR-[number]: [Title]

**Status:** Proposed | Accepted | Deprecated | Superseded
**Date:** [Date]
**Deciders:** [Who needs to sign off]

## Context
[What is the situation? What forces are at play?]

## Decision
[What is the change we're proposing?]

## Options Considered

### Option A: [Name]
| Dimension | Assessment |
|-----------|------------|
| Complexity | [Low/Med/High] |
| Cost | [Assessment] |
| Scalability | [Assessment] |
| Team familiarity | [Assessment] |

**Pros:** [List]
**Cons:** [List]

### Option B: [Name]
[Same format]

## Trade-off Analysis
[Key trade-offs between options with clear reasoning]

## Consequences
- [What becomes easier]
- [What becomes harder]
- [What we'll need to revisit]

## Action Items
1. [ ] [Implementation step]
2. [ ] [Follow-up]

If Connectors Available

If ~~knowledge base is connected:

Search for prior ADRs and design docs
Find relevant technical context

If ~~project tracker is connected:

Link to related epics and tickets
Create implementation tasks

Tips

State constraints upfront — “We need to ship in 2 weeks” or “Must handle 10K rps” shapes the answer.
Name your options — Even if you’re leaning one way, I’ll give a more balanced analysis with explicit alternatives.
Include non-functional requirements — Latency, cost, team expertise, and maintenance burden matter as much as features.