The five Archgate skills that drive the governance workflow inside your AI coding agent — reviewer, lessons-learned, adr-author, onboard, and cli-reference.
Archgate ships five skills as part of the editor plugins. A skill is a focused, reusable capability that your AI coding agent invokes at a specific point in the development workflow. Together they turn the Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) stored in .archgate/ into a closed governance loop: rules are written, code is checked against them, and new lessons feed back into the rules.
The skills are designed to be invoked by the developer agent automatically — you rarely call them by hand. Each one wraps a piece of the workflow:
UNDERSTAND → PLAN → WRITE → VALIDATE → CAPTURE reviewer lessons-learnedonboard runs once at the start of a project to create the initial ADRs. adr-author is the authoritative authoring layer that every other skill delegates to whenever an ADR must be created or edited. cli-reference is an internal helper that loads the canonical CLI documentation on demand.
The Five Skills
Section titled “The Five Skills”reviewer
Validates code changes against project ADRs using domain-specific sub-agents. It gathers context with archgate review-context, runs automated checks, then delegates each affected domain to a focused sub-agent that returns a structured compliance report.
When to use After writing or modifying code, before committing. The developer agent invokes it as the VALIDATE step of every initial task completion. ADR violations are hard blockers; warnings are surfaced but do not block.
lessons-learned
Captures patterns, mistakes, and improvements from a coding session and codifies them into ADRs or project memory so they carry forward to future sessions and agents. It reads the session transcript and the current governance landscape, then proposes new or extended ADRs.
When to use The CAPTURE step — the last step of the workflow, after archgate check and the reviewer skill confirm compliance. Also when you explicitly ask to 'capture learnings' or after resolving a non-trivial issue.
adr-author
Creates and edits Architecture Decision Records that match the structure, tone, and depth of the project's existing ADRs. It enforces the six required sections, the frontmatter field order, domain ID prefixes, and the companion .rules.ts file when automated enforcement is needed.
When to use Whenever an ADR must be written or changed. It is the single authoring layer — onboard and lessons-learned delegate to it rather than touching ADR files directly. Use Create Mode for a new decision, Edit Mode to update an existing ADR.
onboard
Bootstraps a project into Archgate governance: verifies the CLI, runs archgate init, explores the codebase with parallel sub-agents, interviews you, proposes an ADR backlog, and authors every approved ADR in parallel before delivering a governance summary.
When to use Once, when setting up Archgate for the first time on a project. Re-run it later to extend governance into new domains or audit existing ADRs.
cli-reference
An internal reference loader. On invocation it fetches the canonical Archgate CLI documentation (CLI commands, rules-authoring guide, or ADR format) and returns only the section the calling agent asked for, so agents never guess at command syntax or APIs.
When to use Invoked by other skills and the developer agent — not by you directly. It loads before running an unfamiliar archgate command, writing a .rules.ts file, or authoring an ADR.