breakdown-epic-arch

This skill is a prompt that turns Copilot into a Senior Software Architect and guides it to produce a high-level technical architecture specification for an Epic, based on a Product Requirements Document. It solves the gap between product-level requirements and engineering execution by generating a structured architecture document that outlines the major components, features, and technical enablers needed to build the epic.

The skill takes an Epic PRD as input and outputs a complete Markdown specification saved to a conventional docs path. The specification follows a defined structure: an architecture overview, a comprehensive Mermaid system-architecture diagram organized into user, application, service, data, and infrastructure layers with color coding and data-flow arrows, a list of high-level features and technical enablers, a technology stack, a technical value estimate, and a t-shirt size estimate. It carries opinionated context assumptions about the target stack, including domain-driven architecture, self-hosted and SaaS deployment, Docker containerization, a TypeScript/Next.js App Router stack, Turborepo monorepo patterns, tRPC for type-safe APIs, and Stack Auth for authentication. The prompt instructs the model to avoid writing code except for pseudocode where technically necessary.

It targets software architects, tech leads, and product-minded engineers who plan work in epics and want a consistent, diagram-rich architecture artifact to guide implementation. It is a documentation and planning prompt with no scripts, commands, or destructive behavior.