By name: eng-holistic-systems description: Model the end-to-end system, constraints, and failure modes before touching code; use whenever a change spans multiple layers or unclear requirements.
Holistic Systems Thinking
Intent
- Understand the true user goal, success metrics, and non-negotiable constraints.
- Trace data/control flow across clients, services, contracts, and on-chain/off-chain boundaries.
- Surface hidden couplings, scalability ceilings, and rollback requirements early.
Inputs to Gather
- Problem statement in your own words plus measurable success criteria.
- Existing architecture sketches (runtime, deployment, data lifecycle) and ownership boundaries.
- Operational constraints: latency/throughput budgets, privacy rules, platform limitations, on-chain gas caps, store policies, etc.
- Known risks: single points of failure, stale assumptions, migrations in flight.
Workflow
- Map the ecosystem
- List upstream/downstream systems, contracts, and user touchpoints affected.
- Identify invariants that must hold and where they can break.
- Reason about change scope
- Partition work into independently testable slices with explicit integration seams.
- Decide where to place new logic (client/server/worker/contract) based on latency, trust, and deployability.
- Plan resiliency
- Define failure detection signals, graceful degradation, and rollback/feature-flag hooks.
- Highlight areas needing schema/version negotiation.
- Record decisions for execution
- Capture the chosen approach, tradeoffs, and open questions inside the ticket/PR description before implementation.
Verification
- Confirm each requirement maps to at least one planned change and validation step.
- Share the plan with a peer or stakeholder; ensure assumptions and risks are acknowledged.
- Revisit this skill after implementation planning to see if new dependencies appeared; update the plan accordingly.