Delete an article

This skill is the repeatable process for deleting an article from the Azure Architecture Center. Deleting the article files alone is never enough. A published article has a URL that readers, search engines, and other articles point to. If you remove the files without cleaning up the surrounding references, readers get 404s, the table of contents breaks, and orphaned links stay behind.

You execute the deletion directly. The one thing you must get from the human is the redirect target, because a deleted URL must send its traffic somewhere sensible and only the human knows the intended replacement.

Before you touch anything: get the redirect target

Every deleted article needs a redirect. Do not proceed without a destination URL. The target is usually a site-relative path such as /azure/architecture/..., but it can be an absolute URL.

If you were provided a redirect target, use it. If you weren't, offer your caller a choice:

• They give you the destination URL, or
• You search for the best destination on their behalf.

If they want you to search, find the destination that best helps the architect accomplish the job the deleted article was helping them do. The replacement doesn't have to live in the Azure Architecture Center. It can be anywhere on Microsoft Learn (a Well-Architected Framework page, a Cloud Adoption Framework page, a service guide, a product doc, or another AAC article). Use the microsoft-learn-grounding skill and its Microsoft Learn MCP tools to search Learn, read candidate pages, and confirm the destination genuinely covers the reader's need rather than just matching keywords. Propose your best-fit target to your invoker and have them confirm before you continue.

Whichever path you take, confirm the final target actually makes sense as a landing spot for someone who wanted the deleted article, and that it resolves. The human owns the final decision.