The Unhinged Architect 🏗️

A roast-driven, build-from-scratch mentorship system for Claude Code. The Architect — twenty years of shipped systems and zero patience — drags your raw idea through five phases all the way to running code, roasting your decisions and then being annoyingly right about every one. A junior-engineer agent does the actual typing and gets torn apart in code review. A living tracker remembers everything between sessions.

It's a comedy bit wrapped around a genuinely disciplined dev workflow: spec → design → architecture → standards → tracked implementation. The roast is what makes you actually do the planning you'd normally skip.

Roast dial: UNHINGED (max drama, clean, always aimed at the work — never the human).

What's in here

unhinged-architect/
├── SKILL.md                          # The orchestrator: persona + phase router
├── README.md                         # this file
├── references/
│   ├── persona.md                    # The Architect's voice + the UNHINGED calibration
│   ├── persona-designer.md           # The Designer (Phase 2 only) — a distinct voice
│   ├── phase-1-project-overview.md   # interview playbooks, one per phase
│   ├── phase-2-ui-context.md
│   ├── phase-3-architecture.md
│   ├── phase-4-code-standards.md
│   └── phase-5-implementation.md     # the delegate → review → roast loop
├── assets/                           # templates for the artifacts each phase produces
│   ├── PROJECT_OVERVIEW.template.md
│   ├── UI_CONTEXT.template.md
│   ├── ARCHITECTURE.template.md
│   ├── CODE_STANDARDS.template.md
│   └── PROJECT_TRACKER.template.md   # the living memory across phases/sessions
└── agents/
    └── junior-engineer.md            # the Junior subagent (gets roasted in Phase 5)

Install (Claude Code)

From your project root:

# 1. The skill
mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -r unhinged-architect .claude/skills/

# 2. The Junior subagent must live in .claude/agents/ to be spawnable
mkdir -p .claude/agents
cp .claude/skills/unhinged-architect/agents/junior-engineer.md .claude/agents/

(For user-wide install instead of per-project, use ~/.claude/skills/ and ~/.claude/agents/.)

Then just talk to Claude Code: "I've got an app idea, let's start" — the skill triggers and the Architect takes over.

The flow

1. Phase 1 — Project Overview. The Architect interrogates your idea into a PROJECT_OVERVIEW.md spec, then creates PROJECT_TRACKER.md.
2. Phase 2 — UI Context. He calls in The Designer (different voice, same savagery) to nail look/feel/screens → UI_CONTEXT.md.
3. Phase 3 — Architecture. Stack, data model, components, decisions-with-reasons → ARCHITECTURE.md.
4. Phase 4 — Code Standards. The enforceable house rules + repo layout → CODE_STANDARDS.md.
5. Phase 5 — Implementation. The Architect delegates each task to the Junior, reviews the diffs against the standards, roasts, sends back or approves, and updates the tracker. Repeat until it ships.

Every phase produces a written artifact, ends with your sign-off, and updates the tracker. Start a new session anytime — the Architect reads the tracker and resumes where you left off.

Config notes

• The Junior runs on sonnet (see frontmatter in agents/junior-engineer.md) while the Architect runs on your main session model. Run your main session on Opus for the sharpest reviews — the model gap is the seniority gap, which keeps the roasts honest. Want more chaos (and lower cost)? Set the Junior to model: haiku.
• "The Architect doesn't code" is enforced two ways: in-character (he always delegates) and structurally (the Junior subagent is scoped to write tools — Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Glob, Grep — so implementation flows through it).
• Cost: the Phase 5 roast loop is a multi-agent workflow and uses meaningfully more tokens than a single-agent session. Fine for a fun build — just know it going in.
• Dialing the roast: UNHINGED is the default. Tell the Architect to "ease up" anytime and he drops to gentler — same character, lower volume. He also auto-softens if you seem stressed or say you're new.

Why it works

The two non-negotiables baked into every persona file: roast the work, never the human, and every roast lands on a real fix. That's the line between shareable-savage and just mean — and it's what makes the thing fun to use and fun to screenshot.