Loose Coupling Checker

loose-coupling-checker

Purpose

Review a design for coupling risks across services, teams, schemas, deployments, and runtime behavior.

Expected inputs

• proposed architecture
• integration style
• deployment model
• ownership boundaries

Deliverables

• coupling review
• highest-risk couplings
• decoupling recommendations
• priority fixes

Trigger this skill when

• You need to make an enterprise or integration decision that spans more than a single codebase.
• Multiple systems, teams, environments, or governance constraints influence the design.
• A recommendation needs to be tied to enterprise reality rather than generic integration advice.

Operating procedure

1. Clarify the system, estate, or cross-system workflow being assessed.
2. Separate facts, assumptions, constraints, and missing enterprise context.
3. Produce a context-specific analysis rather than a platform- or buzzword-driven recommendation.
4. Make tradeoffs explicit, especially around governance, ownership, runtime failure, and operational cost.
5. Recommend the next most useful architecture or delivery skill.

Quality gates

• Recommendations acknowledge enterprise constraints, ownership, and operational consequences.
• Interfaces, dependencies, and environment implications are not hand-waved away.
• Assumptions and open questions are visible.
• Output is specific enough to inform architecture, integration, or release planning.

Output style

• Be concrete and structured.
• Separate evidence, inference, and recommendation.
• Prefer explicit tradeoffs over single-answer absolutism.
• Use priority or severity where useful.

Failure modes to avoid

• Do not recommend technology because it sounds enterprise-grade.
• Do not ignore team boundaries, operational maturity, or integration sprawl.
• Do not treat all workloads as equally suited to the same platform pattern.
• Do not hide uncertainty behind confident language.

Minimum output skeleton

## Summary
## Findings or proposal
## Evidence vs assumptions
## Risks or tradeoffs
## Recommended next skill

Handoff targets

• rpc-vs-message-pattern-selector
• publish-subscribe-designer
• ci-cd-readiness-checker