Project Setup — Tech-Stack Advisor

This skill owns one thing: the kit's recommended tech-stack defaults and why. The workflows that consume it live elsewhere:

• Initializing a project / generating CLAUDE.md → dotnet-init (interactive flow, architecture questionnaire, CLAUDE.md generation)
• Assessing an existing codebase → health-check (the canonical 8-dimension graded assessment)
• EF Core schema, NuGet, or .NET version migrations → migrate
• Choosing an architecture → architecture-advisor (always ask before recommending)

Core Principles

1. Recommend a default, explain the why, let the user choose — Every dimension has a kit default, but defaults are starting points, not mandates. State the trade-off in one line so the choice is informed.
2. Prefer built-in .NET over third-party — HybridCache over Redis-client wrappers, built-in rate limiting over packages, built-in OpenAPI over Swashbuckle. Fewer dependencies means fewer licensing surprises and upgrade breaks.
3. License-aware picks — MediatR (v13+), MassTransit (v9+), and FluentAssertions (v8+) went commercial. The kit defaults to MIT alternatives: Mediator, Wolverine, plain xUnit asserts.
4. Add messaging later, not never — Most projects don't need a message bus on day one. Default to "None (add later)" and reach for Wolverine when async workflows actually appear.

Patterns

Tech-Stack Dimensions and Defaults