plan

To convert research findings into actionable architecture plans, you can use a phased workflow that generates mandatory design artifacts like Design Rationale and Pattern Selection. This bridges scattered research outputs to production-ready architecture by enforcing evidence-based decision making and traceability across iterative phases.

Mandatory design artifacts for evidence-based architecture planning include Design Rationale, Tree of Thought, Chain of Draft Evolution, YAGNI declarations, and Pattern Selection. Generating these five artifacts captures design evolution, explicit risk considerations, and pattern selection rationale to ensure repeatability.

To start architecture planning from an existing research task file, load the file located at ./.apex/tasks/[ID].md and run the architecture workflow with a plan request using the task identifier. This initiates the phased workflow and frontmatter-driven state validation to produce design artifacts.

Architecture planning with phase gating does support iterative design validation through frontmatter-driven state and artifact-driven validation. This approach satisfies phase gating requirements by ensuring each design iteration produces mandatory artifacts that validate pattern selection and evidence-based decisions before progression.

The best way to document pattern selection and YAGNI declarations in software architecture is to generate dedicated artifacts that capture explicit risk considerations and evidence-based rationale. This ensures traceability and repeatability by recording why specific patterns were chosen and which features were intentionally excluded.