Staff Engineer Path
Who it's for
Staff and principal engineers accountable for system shape. Agents increase change velocity; without sharper architecture controls, they accelerate erosion.
Prerequisites
- Ownership (formal or de facto) of architecture decisions in at least one critical system
- Ability to mandate ADRs / ARCHITECTURE.md updates in the review path
- Comfort saying no to "the agent already built it"
Ordered modules
- What Not to Delegate — draw the line in writing
- Exploring Options — agents research; humans decide
- Constraints and Validation — make constraints machine-checkable where possible
- Decision Records — stop re-litigating in every session
- ARCHITECTURE.md template — current reality, not roadmap fiction
- Architecture Erosion — symptoms and early detection
- Legacy Refactor — behavior-preserving change under control
- Architecture Recovery case study — honest recovery arc
- Navigability — agents follow structure you leave them
- Architecture review notes — run reviews that produce decisions
Exercises
- Inventory the last 10 agent PRs: count new patterns that contradict ARCHITECTURE.md or ADRs; file ADRs or delete the patterns.
- Add hard constraints to CLAUDE.md pointing at the three ADRs agents most often violate.
- Run one architecture review using the review notes template; publish the ADR the same week.
- Design one automated check (lint, import boundary, CI) that encodes a constraint you currently enforce only by review.
Capstone
Pick one erosion hotspot. Produce: updated ARCHITECTURE.md section, one ADR, CLAUDE.md pointers, a refactor plan with mergeable steps, and a before/after metric (e.g. cross-boundary imports, duplicated modules).
Expected outcome
You can increase agent throughput without losing the plot — rejected options stay rejected, and architecture reviews produce durable artifacts agents cannot ignore.