Describe what you're building. The LLM will ask the strategic questions — one phase at a time.
Describe Your Project
What does the project do? (One line)
Where does data come from?
How much data? (per day / total expected)
Any known constraints? (platform, language, budget, compliance)
Architecture Strategy
Compute Model
How should data be processed for display?
State & Persistence
What state needs to survive between requests? Between restarts?
What happens if state gets corrupted? Recovery path?
Caching Strategy
What is the acceptable staleness window?
What events invalidate the cache?
Who pays the cold-start penalty?
Scaling
At 10x current data volume, what breaks first?
Bottleneck: I/O, CPU, or memory?
Operations & Resilience
Process Model
How many services? What ports? What starts them?
Backup Strategy
What needs backing up? What's excluded? How often?
Database Strategy
SQLite, Postgres, etc? WAL mode? Multiple databases?
Recovery
System is completely broken. Step 1?
Hard-Learned Questions
These came from real failures. Answer them BEFORE they happen.
What other hard-learned lessons apply specifically to this project?