SkillVaultskills Browse all 1,000+ skills

Architecture · Version 1.2.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

Change Blast Radius Reviewer

Make a defensible decision about dependency blast-radius analysis and affected consumer inventory with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 4 documented failure modes 4 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Measures which users, services, contracts, data, and operational paths a change can affect if it fails. It grounds the decision in changed symbols, runtime callers, external consumers, deployment topology, data ownership, and feature exposure and explicitly prevents counting imports while dynamic calls, shared data, configuration readers, or rollout coupling remain invisible.

₹199 one-time

Get this skill archive

Install in your AI coding tool

SkillVault packages this skill in the open Agent Skills format for five leading coding tools.

What this skill helps you do

  • Dependency blast-radius analysis
  • Affected consumer inventory
  • Failure containment review

How Change Blast Radius Reviewer works

You provide

Requirements, constraints, and the current topology

It inspects

Critical path and failure boundaries for dependency blast-radius analysis

It decides

A affected consumer inventory decision with consequences recorded

You verify

Rollout stages with the signal that gates each one

What it checks first

Change Blast Radius Reviewer measures which users, services, contracts, data, and operational paths a change can affect if it fails. It grounds the decision in changed symbols, runtime callers, external consumers, deployment topology, data ownership, and feature exposure and explicitly prevents counting imports while dynamic calls, shared data, configuration readers, or rollout coupling remain invisible. Use it when the work involves Dependency blast-radius analysis, Affected consumer inventory, Failure containment review.

  1. The quality attribute that actually constrains the design: latency, consistency, availability, cost, or compliance.
  2. The critical path and the number of network hops on it.
  3. Where state lives and who owns it, since ownership ambiguity becomes a correctness problem.
  4. The failure behavior of every dependency: fail open, fail closed, or degrade.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • Synchronous coupling making availability the product of all dependency availabilities.
  • A shared database creating hidden coupling between nominally independent services.
  • A component with no clear owner, so its failure has no defined response.
  • Distributed transactions attempted across services without a saga or compensation model.

Answers it will reject

  • Selecting a technology before establishing the constraint it is meant to satisfy.
  • Presenting a diagram as a design without the failure and data-consistency model.
  • Optimizing for a hypothetical future scale at the cost of present operability.

Decision rules it applies

  • Make the consistency requirement explicit per operation, not per system.
  • Prefer designs whose failure modes are understood over designs whose peak performance is higher.
  • Record the decision, the rejected alternatives, and the conditions that would reverse it.

Evidence it asks for

  • Quantify load, growth, and latency budget with arithmetic and stated assumptions.
  • Define the rollout stages and the signal that gates each one.
  • Name the reversal path for the decision.

The method inside

  1. Map the artifact, actors, boundaries, and invariants relevant to dependency blast-radius analysis.
  2. Trace concrete failure or abuse paths for affected consumer inventory; do not report checklist items without a mechanism.
  3. Prioritize failure containment review findings by impact, likelihood, confidence, and cost of correction.
  4. Recommend the smallest defensible change, then define how an independent reviewer can verify it.

Deliverables

  • Dependency blast-radius analysis assessment
  • Affected consumer inventory decision and action plan
  • Failure containment review verification checklist

Evidence requirements

  • Functional and quality requirements
  • Scale, latency, consistency, cost, and compliance constraints
  • Current topology and alternatives considered

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

Apply the change blast radius reviewer to our current dependency blast-radius analysis work. We need a concrete decision, bounded changes, and evidence that the result is correct.

Expected output

Start with changed symbols, runtime callers, external consumers, deployment topology, data ownership, and feature exposure. The highest-risk failure is counting imports while dynamic calls, shared data, configuration readers, or rollout coupling remain invisible. Use runtime and data dependencies to define impact, then separate reachable consumers from theoretical references. Verify the result by tracing representative consumers and testing containment with the changed component unavailable or incorrect.

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Dependency blast-radius analysis: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Affected consumer inventory: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Failure containment review: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Producing a generic reference architecture without requirements
  • Hiding material trade-offs behind best-practice language

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot Agent Skills
  • Cursor Agent Skills
  • Claude Code Skills
  • OpenAI Codex Skills
  • JetBrains Junie Skills

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.