AI Prompt for Software Architecture Review
Evaluate a system's architecture for scalability, reliability, and maintainability — with explicit trade-offs, not just ideals.
What it does
Reviews a system architecture the way a principal engineer would during a design review: by identifying the actual trade-offs being made, not just listing violations of best practices. Every architecture makes trade-offs. This prompt surfaces them explicitly so you can decide whether you’re making the right ones for your constraints.
Example output
A 3–4 line excerpt of what this prompt produces.
Trade-off #2: Synchronous inter-service calls in the order pipeline You're paying for consistency (no order can complete with stale inventory) but buying latency — a single slow inventory check blocks the entire checkout flow. This is intentional if your SLA tolerates 800ms p99; it's a problem if you're targeting sub-200ms. The team hasn't stated which. Consider: would an async reservation pattern with compensation give you the consistency guarantee at 3x lower latency?
Prompt structure
The sections this prompt guides the model through.
- 1. ARCHITECTURE SUMMARY
- 2. TRADE-OFF ANALYSIS
- 3. FAILURE MODES
- 4. SCALING BOTTLENECKS
- 5. RECOMMENDATIONS
Opening lines
The first lines of the prompt itself.
Review the following system architecture. Focus on trade-offs, not ideals.…
One rule from the prompt
A single rule — the full prompt contains more.
Do NOT recommend microservices, Kubernetes, or event sourcing as default answers. Recommend only what the stated constraints justify.
Unlock the full prompt
Part of the Engineering Toolkit Pack — 7 prompts for CHF 19.
View pack — CHF 19