Agent skill · alirezarezvani
cto-review
/cs:cto-review <plan> — Architecture and scaling interrogation. Tech debt, scaling cliffs, team scaling, build-vs-buy. Use when committing to an architecture, planning for 10x load, or weighing a rebuild against a vendor.
What it needs
About 2k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
/cs:cto-review — CTO Forcing Questions Command: /cs:cto-review <plan> Pressure-tests architecture and engineering scaling decisions. Six questions to surface the next scaling cliff before you hit it. When to Run Before approving a major architecture change Before doubling the engineering team Before a build-vs-buy decision > $100K/year When a system is showing reliability stress (SLOs missed) Before committing to a new platform / language / DB The Six CTO Questions 1. Scaling Cliff Where does the current architecture break, in terms of users / requests / data volume? Be specific. "It breaks at 10× current load because the primary DB writes saturate." If you don't know, run a load test before deciding. 2. Tech Debt Inventory What's the top tech debt item, what's it costing per week, and when does it become blocking? 3. Team Scaling For each open req, what's the ramp time and contribution model? 4. Build vs Buy Why are we building this instead of buying it — and what's the 3-year TCO of each? If "we want control" or "it's not that hard" — push back. If the answer is "this is our core moat," build. 5. SLO / Reliability What are the SLOs for this system and what's the current error budget burn? Without an SLO, you can't reason about reliability tradeoffs. See engineering/slo-architect for SLO design. 6. Security & Compliance Surface What does this expose, and has cs-ciso-advisor signed off? Architecture decisions are compliance decisions. Loop in cs-ciso-advisor before commit. Workflow 1. Run the tech debt analyzer + team scaling calculator 2. Define the scaling-cliff hypothesis explicitly 3. Cross-check with cs-ciso-advisor for security implications 4. Apply the verdict Output Format Routing /cs:ciso-review — mandatory if data surface changes /cs:cfo-review — for build-vs-buy > $100K /cs:execute — quarterly plan /cs:boardroom — for architecture pivots Related Agent: cs-cto-advisor Skill: cto-advisor SLO: ../../../engineering/slo-architect/ --- Version: 1.0.0
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills alirezarezvani/cto-review--96ac00