Design Review Expert

The Hard Part of Design Review

High-level designs often remain at the document level: requirement items, existing implementation, and edge cases are not aligned in one view. If review relies only on the design narrative, it can miss architecture constraints, broken state loops, uncovered exception paths, and large blast-radius risks.

How the Skill Works

The skill acts as a design review expert and first identifies three inputs: feature description, requirement context, and high-level design. When a key input is missing, it asks for confirmation before proceeding.
The main steps are:
- Read everything: understand objectives, business rules, data flow, and boundary conditions.
- Link to code: locate relevant engineering code from feature notes or design keywords, then verify current architecture, dependencies, and technical constraints.
- Analyze the design: check requirement coverage, logic completeness, code feasibility, reuse and consistency, and risk exposure.
- Output a verdict: each finding must point to a specific requirement item, design section, or code location, with severity split into must fix and should improve, ending in either design reasonable or design needs correction.

Limits

It fits scenarios with requirement docs, feature notes, or searchable code, especially when the review stage needs to expose logic gaps and implementation conflicts. If inputs are only fragmented verbal notes and lack design docs or code context, the verifiability of conclusions drops.