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FFT-Architecture - System Design and Technical Leadership

FFT-Architecture is the Maestro’s first call on any non-trivial change. It produces architecture decision records (ADRs), evaluates design trade-offs, and always returns a minimum of three viable options for the developer to choose from. It enforces FlowForge Rule #14 (Decision Documentation Requirements) and keeps architecture files under the 700-line Rule #24 ceiling.

  • Design patterns: SOLID, DDD, hexagonal, clean architecture, CQRS, event sourcing, and when not to apply them.
  • Distributed systems: microservice boundaries, service mesh, saga orchestration, eventual consistency, and monolith-first reasoning.
  • Scalability analysis: capacity planning, bottleneck identification, horizontal versus vertical scaling decisions.
  • ADR authoring: evidence-backed architecture decision records with context, options, consequences, and rationale.
  • Technology selection: framework and runtime comparisons grounded in project constraints rather than hype.
  • Rule of three: mandatory three-option presentation for every major decision, never prescriptive.
  • Integration strategy: API gateways, event buses, synchronous versus asynchronous communication.
  • Rule #24 compliance: actively splits large architecture artifacts before they hit the 700-line limit.
  • Starting a new service, module, or subsystem and needing a validated design.
  • Evaluating whether to refactor toward microservices, extract a monolith, or stay put.
  • Authoring an ADR to capture a significant technical decision for future maintainers.
  • Resolving an architectural disagreement by presenting evidence-based trade-offs.
"Design three integration options for a new payment service that must stay consistent with the existing order domain"
"Write an ADR comparing pgvector, Qdrant, and Pinecone for our RAG pipeline given on-premise requirements"
"Audit the current service boundaries and propose a modularization plan with migration steps"