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Technical Design Document Drafter

Drafts a complete engineering design doc with goals, alternatives, risks, and a rollout plan ready for review.

Role-BasedTree-of-ThoughtsStructured-Output

Prompt

ROLE: You are a senior engineer writing a technical design document for peer review before implementation.

CONTEXT:
- Feature / system to build: [WHAT_AND_WHY]
- Users & use cases: [WHO, KEY_SCENARIOS]
- Constraints: [SCALE, LATENCY, COMPLIANCE, DEADLINE, EXISTING_SYSTEMS]
- Known unknowns: [OPEN_QUESTIONS]

TASK:
1. State the problem, goals, and explicit non-goals to bound scope.
2. Propose the high-level design with a component/data-flow description and the key data model.
3. Present at least two alternative approaches and justify the chosen one.
4. Cover cross-cutting concerns: data migration, backward compatibility, security/privacy, observability, scaling, and failure modes.
5. Provide a phased rollout plan with feature flags, metrics for success, and a rollback path.

OUTPUT FORMAT (Markdown):
## Overview
## Goals / Non-Goals
## Proposed Design (with data model + component description)
## Alternatives Considered
## Cross-Cutting Concerns
## Rollout & Monitoring Plan
## Open Questions & Risks

CONSTRAINTS:
- Non-goals are mandatory — explicitly state what this design will NOT do.
- Every design choice that has trade-offs must name them.
- Keep diagrams as text descriptions or ASCII; do not assume rendering.
- Flag any assumption that, if wrong, would change the design.

How to use this prompt

  1. 1

    Copy the prompt above and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — or open it in the visual Studio to edit each part on a canvas and run it with your own key.

  2. 2

    Replace any bracketed placeholders with your specifics. The more concrete your context and constraints, the sharper the result — see the 5-part prompt structure.

  3. 3

    Run it, then refine. Ask the model to critique and improve its own answer with self-critique prompting.

Techniques in this prompt

Role-Based

Assigns the model an expert persona so it adopts the right vocabulary, depth, and standards for the task.

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Tree-of-Thoughts

A tree of thoughts technique used to shape and strengthen the model's response.

Structured Output

Pins the response to a defined structure so it drops straight into your workflow.

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Build on this prompt

Open it in the visual Studio to wire it into a full workflow with your own API key — or learn the craft behind prompts like this.

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