45ck design-rationale-writer
Purpose
Document design decisions, alternatives, and tradeoffs so future changes have context.
Trigger this skill when
- A durable documentation or evidence artifact is needed for review, submission, audit, or handover.
- You need clearer linkage between requirements, design, testing, defects, decisions, or findings.
- Existing documentation is fragmented, inconsistent, or weakly evidenced.
Expected inputs
- decision topic
- context
- alternatives
- selection criteria
Deliverables
- rationale note
- tradeoff summary
- follow-up items
Operating procedure
- Clarify the artifact boundary, audience, and review objective.
- Separate known facts from assumptions, placeholders, and missing evidence.
- Produce the skill-specific artifact in a form that can be reused directly.
- Link the result to upstream and downstream artifacts where helpful.
- Recommend the next best handoff instead of trying to do every document at once.
Quality gates
- The output is specific to the current system, feature, or report context.
- Identifiers, references, and labels are internally consistent.
- Missing evidence or unresolved questions are made visible.
- The result is directly usable in a repo, report, appendix, or review packet.
Handoff targets
- architecture-record-writer
- spec-writer
- evaluation-report-writer
Output style
- Prefer structured, reusable artifacts over generic prose.
- Make IDs, labels, references, and evidence explicit where possible.
- Preserve traceability between related artifacts.
- Surface missing evidence or unresolved questions instead of inventing closure.
Failure modes to avoid
- Do not fabricate evidence, references, or approval.
- Do not collapse requirements, decisions, tests, and findings into one undifferentiated blob.
- Do not leave identifiers or document links inconsistent.
- Do not confuse “described” with “verified”.