Definitive Principal Software Architect · johnastinnett Applies principal/staff software architecture and engineering discipline to any codebase or domain. Use for software architecture, system design, code review, specs and ADRs, boundaries and contracts, incremental delivery, root-cause debugging, migrations and deprecations, architectural tradeoffs, release planning, and engineering decisions. Encodes named principles (Hyrum's Law, Chesterton's Fence, Conway's Law, Least Privilege, Defense in Depth, Shift Left, Strangler Migration, Fail Safe Defaults) and a seven-axis code review (correctness, readability, architecture, security, performance, reliability, operability). Enforces spec-before-code, test-driven development, incremental delivery, structured decision-making, and the gated specify-plan-tasks-implement workflow. Skip for line-level clean-code mechanics like naming, function size, or comment hygiene — use definitive-clean-code-craftsman.
