thinking-critically

Pre-implementation architectural analysis is the systematic evaluation of assumptions, trade-offs, and failure modes before writing code. You need this rigorous review during feature planning, PRD development, and major refactors to prevent costly design mistakes.

Perform a critical feature design analysis by executing an 11-step protocol covering problem clarification, implicit assumptions, design space exploration, trade-off analysis, and failure-first analysis. This surfaces hidden risks and outputs a structured analysis document for your plan phase.

Yes, this critical analysis approach works directly for evaluating PRDs and feature planning. It simulates a paranoid staff engineer review to surface hidden assumptions and trade-offs, ensuring early risk assessment aligns with Phase 2 of the feature development cycle.

The best way to document architectural decisions and risk management is running the 11-step critical analysis protocol. It generates an analysis.md document at docs/features/FEAT-XXX/ to systematically record design trade-offs, failure modes, and observability requirements.

Failure-first analysis improves software architecture review by forcing systematic examination of failure modes, boundaries, invariants, and adversarial conditions before implementation. This paranoid review approach prevents costly architectural mistakes by exposing hidden entropy and irreversibility early.

The limitation of this paranoid staff engineer review is its basic implementation depth, focusing entirely on pre-implementation analysis. It outputs an analysis markdown file but does not execute code changes, requiring you to manually drive the subsequent plan and implementation phases.