System Design

This walks solo developers through the gap between validated requirements and actual architecture, diagnosing six states from "no requirements clarity" to "design validated." It's opinionated about common traps: over-engineering for hypothetical futures, under-engineering critical paths, and building components in isolation without thinking through integration points. The walking skeleton concept is central here, pushing you to define the thinnest end-to-end path before building horizontally across layers. Worth using when you've finished requirements analysis but keep making architecture decisions by gut feel or defaulting to patterns without understanding the tradeoffs. The ADR and component mapping interventions are lightweight enough to actually use.