Production Claude Architecture Packet
1. Executive Decision
- Decision requested:
- Business outcome and owner:
- Baseline and target:
- Investment range:
- Recommended option:
- Residual risk:
- Approval required from:
2. Discovery
- Users and affected parties:
- Current workflow:
- Functional requirements:
- Quality and performance requirements:
- Security and safety constraints:
- Operability and lifecycle requirements:
- Non-goals:
- Assumptions and evidence plan:
3. Architecture Decisions
For each decision, record context, options, selection, rejected alternatives, consequences, owner, verification, review date, and reversal condition.
4. System and Data Views
- Context diagram
- End-to-end sequence
- Data and identity flow
- Deployment and ownership view
- Failure, partial-result, and escalation paths
5. RAG and Knowledge
- Sources and owners:
- Parsing and chunking:
- Index and version strategy:
- Retrieval and filters:
- Provenance contract:
- Freshness, rollback, and evaluation:
6. Integration and Identity
- Protocol decisions:
- Tool catalog and progressive discovery:
- Principal and scope propagation:
- Approval and high-risk action binding:
- Error and retry contracts:
7. Evaluation and Observability
- Representative datasets and strata:
- Retrieval, task, trajectory, safety, latency, and cost gates:
- Baseline and candidate evidence:
- Logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and redaction:
- Shadow, canary, rollout, and rollback:
8. Governance
- Risk register:
- Data map and retention:
- Control matrix with owners and tests:
- Human review design:
- Fairness and contestability:
- Required technical, security, privacy, legal, and domain approvals:
9. Operations and Handoff
- SLOs and alert owners:
- Runbooks and failure drills:
- Reviewer capacity:
- Change and incident process:
- Handoff acceptance evidence:
- Retirement criteria:
10. Open Decisions
| Decision | Evidence needed | Owner | Due date | Safe default |
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