reviewing-technical-design — SKILL.md

Variant: standard · When to use: judging a finished technical design doc as an acceptance gate — checking an engineer can implement it without re-deriving the design, then emitting VERDICT: approve|revise with actionable findings. Greenfield, or an amend (delta-scoped).

Overview

This skill is the review half of a producing/judging technical-design pair. Loaded by a reviewer who holds a finished technical design document (TDD) — the document below the feature-spec that says how one feature will be built within an existing system — it judges that doc against one question: can an engineer implement this feature without re-deriving the design, and is the chosen approach justified against a real alternative? It applies a fixed 11-condition implementability checklist (the same bar a TDD author produces to — authoring-technical-design's Step-5 — so the produce-bar and the review-bar do not drift), then emits a single machine-parseable verdict plus findings the author can act on in one revision pass. It is an acceptance gate — it does not author, fix, or rewrite the design; it judges and returns findings, and the producer revises.

The bar is single-sourced with the author. The author's techniques — FMEA failure-mode analysis, the RTM trace matrix, C4 altitude framing, the choice of sequence vs flow diagram, pseudo-code form — are aids the reviewer judges by OUTCOME (is every decision traced? are failures handled? are signals named?), never conditions to demand. But note the boundary: rollout, observability, and testing ARE real, load-bearing conditions for a TDD (cond-7/8/9) — they are not "invented" conditions here the way a rollout demand would be for a feature-spec. What stays an aid is the technique (FMEA/RTM/C4/diagram-choice), not the outcome (a named signal, a traced decision, a rollback trigger).

When to activate

• A finished technical design doc needs an accept/revise decision before an engineer implements from it.
• You are the independent reviewer / gate for a TDD a producer just authored.
• Re-judging a revised TDD after a prior revise verdict.
• Reviewing an amend — an approved TDD + a change request — as a delta-scoped review (cond-11).

Do NOT activate when: