bostonaholic How — Architectural Explanation
Explore the codebase to answer "how does X work?" Produce the mental model a senior engineer needs to start working in an unfamiliar subsystem — the architecture, the flow, and the sharp edges. Not annotated source code.
Companion to skills/why/SKILL.md: how answers what the code does and
how it works; why answers what forces led to its shape. When the user
asks about motivation, rejected alternatives, or history, that is why's
job.
This skill is read-only. It writes no files, records no artifacts, and changes no state — in this session and in every subagent it dispatches.
Two modes:
- Explain (default) — explore and produce a clear explanation.
- Critique — explain first, then dispatch fresh-context critics to judge the architecture.
Procedure references
Read each reference completely when reaching that stage. Follow them in order; later stages depend on state and gates established earlier.
- Input
- Explain mode
- Output format
- Critique mode
- Rules
Applied principles
Load and apply: principle-generator-evaluator and
principle-optimization-never-dependency.