/explore

Five-phase investigation that produces specs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

When to use

• Starting on a new codebase
• Architecture doc is missing or stale
• Before /plan on a brownfield project

What it does

1. Repo contents — What’s in the codebase, what’s the tech stack
2. Internal architecture — Components, boundaries, patterns, data models
3. External connections — APIs, databases, queues, third-party services (with latency, SLAs, failure modes)
4. Ecosystem — Upstream consumers, downstream dependencies, blast radius
5. Operational context — Deployment, monitoring, alerting, on-call, who owns what

Each phase asks questions — it doesn’t just read code and present findings. Challenge-first, decorate-second.

Greenfield projects get a fast exit: detects empty repos, creates minimal scaffolding, sends you to /feature.

Output

specs/ARCHITECTURE.md — the shared reference document that every other command reads.

Next step

/feature to define a feature, or /plan if you already have a spec.