Agent Skills for ADR Guard
Agent Skills are reusable, task-focused instructions that tell a compatible coding agent when and how to help with Architecture Decision Records (ADRs). ADR Guard publishes 11 skills covering the lifecycle from identifying a significant decision to reviewing and maintaining its history.
Skills make the tooling easier to discover and apply consistently. They do not replace your architecture team, install the ADR Guard CLI, or grant an agent authority to accept decisions.
What can you do with them?
Section titled “What can you do with them?”| Goal | Start with | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Decide whether documentation is warranted | When to record | A reasoned recommendation: ADR, lighter documentation or more evidence |
| Discuss viable options | Trade-off analysis | Explicit alternatives, constraints, consequences and uncertainty |
| Start documenting a new decision | Create an ADR | A human-reviewable Proposed ADR |
| Improve an existing record | Validate and Technical review | Structural diagnostics and separate evidence-backed suggestions |
| Change an accepted decision | Supersede | A new proposal and traceable relationship without rewriting history |
| Govern an ADR collection | Audit and Team adoption | Read-only assessment and a lightweight human-owned process |
How they work
Section titled “How they work”- You install the specific skill into a supported agent environment.
- The agent reads the skill’s
SKILL.mdonly when the task is relevant. - It checks the repository’s ADR format, current files and CLI availability.
- It helps formulate questions or, with your authorization, invokes existing ADR Guard commands.
- You and the people responsible review evidence and make the actual decision.
For example, ask your agent: “Help me decide whether our switch to asynchronous messaging needs an ADR; compare alternatives without assuming the outcome.”
The agent may use adr-guard-when-to-record and adr-guard-tradeoff-analysis. A separate request to create the record can use adr-guard-create. A successful adr-guard check validates the record’s structure—not architectural merit.
Start here
Section titled “Start here”- Install skills and prerequisites — discover, install and verify the separate CLI.
- Browse all 11 skills — find the right workflow and responsibility boundary.
- Try end-to-end scenarios — from new decision to audit and supersession.
- Read the safety and governance rules — approvals, privacy, untrusted input, formats and limitations.
The Agent Skills specification defines the portable SKILL.md format. The Skills CLI provides discovery and installation into supported coding agents.