architecture-decisions

Choose between competing technical approaches and make design decisions with an explicit trade-off order. Trigger this when a task requires selecting among 2+ viable designs — "should we use X or Y", designing a schema, shaping a public API, choosing a storage/queue/cache mechanism, deciding whether to add a dependency, or deciding whether to introduce an abstraction. Do NOT trigger for initial request parsing (use task-planning), for line-level style questions (use implementation-standards), or when the codebase already has an established pattern for this exact problem — in that case, follow the existing pattern without deliberation.