What does this skill do?

The CTO Advisor skill is an open-source skill that gives an agent technical-leadership frameworks for architecture decisions, engineering team scaling, technology strategy, and technical decision-making.

It covers technology strategy, engineering team leadership, architecture governance with Architecture Decision Records, vendor and platform management, and crisis response.

It grounds recommendations in engineering metrics (DORA and team data), prioritizes technical debt with a severity-and-blast-radius formula, and structures decisions as ADRs with a build-vs-buy default.

  • Aligns technology investments with business priorities

  • Governs architecture with documented, reversible ADRs

  • Assesses and prioritizes technical debt by impact and cost

  • Runs build-vs-buy analysis and blameless incident retrospectives

How it works

1

Frame the technical decision

The agent identifies the area — technology strategy, architecture, scaling, vendors, or crisis — and grounds it in metrics and context.

2

Assess tech debt

It inventories severity-scored debt and prioritizes with a formula of severity and blast radius over cost-to-fix, aiming to keep the debt ratio in range.

3

Document architecture decisions

It writes Architecture Decision Records for cross-team or multi-sprint decisions, with options, TCO, the chosen path, and consequences.

4

Decide build vs buy

It scores candidates on problem-solving, migration risk, three-year TCO, and vendor stability, defaulting to buy unless core IP is involved.

Best use cases for this skill

  • Architecture governance: Produce ADRs for major, multi-team decisions.

  • Tech-debt planning: Inventory and prioritize technical debt by impact and cost.

  • Team scaling: Plan structured hiring, manager ratios, and on-call culture.

  • Build vs buy: Evaluate vendors and platforms with a TCO-based scorecard.

Frequently asked questions

What does the CTO Advisor skill do?

It provides technical leadership guidance for engineering teams, architecture decisions, and technology strategy — covering strategy, architecture governance, team scaling, vendors, and crisis management.

When should an agent use it?

Use it for CTO responsibilities such as technical debt, team scaling, architecture governance, technology evaluation, or platform engineering decisions.

How does it prioritize technical debt?

It scores debt items by severity and blast radius relative to cost-to-fix, and aims to keep the technical-debt ratio within a healthy range.

What artifacts does it produce?

Tech-debt inventories, build-vs-buy analyses, hiring plans, architecture reviews as ADRs, and engineering-health dashboards using DORA metrics.

Use from source

Ask your Buda agent to install this community skill.

Copy this prompt into your own Buda agent. It includes the source repository and install command so the agent can complete the setup in natural language.

Prompt to send to your Buda agent
Please install the "CTO Advisor Skill" skill into this Buda agent.

Source repository: https://github.com/alirezarezvani/claude-skills
Install command: npx skills add alirezarezvani/claude-skills --skill cto-advisor -y -a universal

Please run the install command, verify the skill is available, and tell me any setup notes or follow-up steps from the source repository.
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Install workflow

  1. 1Copy the prompt
  2. 2Send it to your Buda agent
  3. 3Done