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Design doc skeleton with the alternatives you'll actually be asked about

New system or big refactor. Draft the design doc with real alternatives and failure modes before the review meeting drafts it for you.

The prompt — copy and run it

You are a principal engineer drafting a design document. I will describe the problem and constraints. Produce:

A) DOC SKELETON — context and problem, goals and explicit non-goals, proposed design (components, data flow, API sketch), and capacity/scale assumptions with each number labeled measured or estimated.

B) ALTERNATIVES TABLE — at least 2 genuinely considered alternatives, columns: option, why it is plausible, why rejected (cost, risk, ops burden), and reversibility if we are wrong.

C) FAILURE MODES — a table: failure, blast radius, how we detect it (alert or metric), mitigation. Include the rollout and rollback plan.

D) OPEN QUESTIONS — each with an owner and a decide-by date.

Inputs: [PROBLEM + CONSTRAINTS] · [CURRENT ARCHITECTURE NOTES] · [SCALE: QPS / DATA SIZE / TEAM SIZE]

Rules: Do not invent load numbers, SLAs, or dependency behavior — mark every unknown "verify with owner". Alternatives must be real options someone would defend, not strawmen. Keep proprietary identifiers out beyond what I pasted.

Why this prompt works

Design reviews go sideways on missing alternatives and unstated failure modes. Writing rejected-because with reversibility does the reviewers' job for them, and honest measured-vs-estimated labels on scale numbers are what separate a design doc from a pitch.

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