Service Communication Audit

Systematic audit of how services talk to each other. Not just finding broken wires — questioning whether each wire should exist, in which direction, at what rate, and what comes back.

The core principle: deep modules with simple interfaces, not webs of shallow wiring. The consumer sees one health surface, one response, one interface. The implementation behind it can be as complex as needed — the consumer doesn't know or care. Every design decision filters through: "does this expose internal wiring to the consumer, or does it stay behind the module boundary?"

The full field guide is at references/communication-audit-guide.md (~40 principles). Do NOT summarize the guide in prompts — workers read it directly.

When To Use

• Services communicate but the connection is unstable or brittle
• Fire-and-forget calls with no acknowledgment or retry
• One service crashes and the other doesn't notice or recover
• No backpressure — failures cause hammering instead of backing off
• "It works if you start things in the right order" (startup race)
• Health checks that lie
• Multiple data channels crammed into one tick at one rate

How It Works