Software Architecture Analysis — Codebase Reverse Engineering to Design Document

When to Use

• A reference implementation exists and you need to understand its architecture for design inspiration
• You need a PRD, design document, or specification for a system in the same problem space
• The output must be clean-room: zero source code samples copied from the reference codebase
• You're designing a system with different architectural constraints (local-first, privacy-first, self-hosted) than the reference
• You need to extract an implicit contract — the storage operations a codebase performs — to design a formal provider abstraction

Don't use for: Direct code review, bug hunting, or security auditing (use a dedicated debugging skill instead). Simple tool or library evaluation (use a spike instead).

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