Architect: Explore the Approach, Decide the Architecture

Input intent: $ARGUMENTS — a PRD, an epic, a brief, or a free-form idea. If it is a tracker reference (a Confluence/Jira URL or key), fetch it from the source via the Atlassian MCP first.

Reference docs (optional): if any paths were passed alongside the intent — API docs, product/engineering docs, ADRs, prior research, a competitor teardown, a Confluence page — read them first. They ground the exploration so you propose options that fit what already exists instead of inventing. If none were passed, ask whether any exist before you start exploring — a lot of the context you need is usually already written down.

What this skill is

The intent says what to build and why. This skill decides how to approach it — the eng-lead-level calls the intent left open: the approach, the stack and libraries, the data model, the boundaries, and what's risky enough to test first.