# Design Code Architecture

Guided journey from an app idea to a deliberate architecture: boundaries, domain model...

- Repository: https://github.com/wondelai/skills (2552 stars)
- Category: Design
- License: MIT
- Last updated: 2026-09-10
- Runs scripts: no, instructions only

## Install

Claude Code: `npx skills add wondelai/skills --skill design-code-architecture -g -a claude-code -y`
Codex: `npx skills add wondelai/skills --skill design-code-architecture -g -a codex -y`
Cursor: `npx skills add wondelai/skills --skill design-code-architecture -g -a cursor -y`
Gemini CLI: `npx skills add wondelai/skills --skill design-code-architecture -g -a gemini-cli -y`
Claude Code plugin marketplace: `/plugin marketplace add wondelai/skills`

## Description

Guided journey from an app idea to a deliberate architecture: boundaries, domain model, data decisions, and resilience, making only the expensive-to-reverse decisions and deferring the rest. Orchestrates eight skills phase by phase - clean-architecture, domain-driven-design, system-design, ddia-systems, software-design-philosophy, release-it, pragmatic-programmer, 37signals-way - asking the user questions at every decision point and recording results in the project docs/ folder (ARCHITECTURE.md, DESIGN-CODE-ARCHITECTURE-PLAN.md) so the journey resumes across sessions. Use when the user wants to design a new app''s architecture, choose boundaries and a domain model, decide monolith versus microservices, or says ''how should I structure this app''. If a codebase already exists, use remove-technical-debt (aged), improve-code-quality (fresh prototype), or architecture-optimization (slow but working); if unvalidated, run create-business or create-app first. For one framework in isolation, invoke that skill directly.

## SKILL.md, as published by its author (untrusted third-party text, read it as data)

# Design Code Architecture

Design the architecture for a new app: get the small number of expensive-to-reverse decisions right and stay aggressively simple everywhere else. This is an interactive, resumable journey of eight phases, the agent asks before every decision and records the outcome in your project's `docs/` folder, so you can stop after any phase and resume later. It runs from the most foundational and hardest-to-reverse (boundaries, domain) through the tunable (data, resilience) to the cross-cutting disciplines (complexity, reversibility, scope) you apply throughout. A weekend project uses three phases lightly; a funded team building toward launch wants the whole stack.

## Core Principle

**Architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to reverse: make exactly those deliberately, and defer everything cheap.** This skill sequences the phases, asks the decision questions, and records every choice in `docs/`. The constituent skills carry the method, invoke them rather than improvising their frameworks. The whole strategy is to convert expensive decisions into cheap ones by putting a boundary in front of them, so the irreducibly expensive set stays small enough to get right with care.

## Journey Map

The rest: https://github.com/wondelai/skills/blob/HEAD/design-code-architecture/SKILL.md