Distributed System Profile

Purpose

Use when correctness depends on multiple independently failing processes. Ownership, delivery, ordering, staleness, convergence, and repair MUST be explicit.

Priority and defaults

Correctness, reliability, and data integrity precede operability, security, and performance.

Core Skill	Mode	Rationale
code-clarity	explicit-critical-path	Make failure and consistency paths visible.
modular-design	service-oriented	Align independently operated ownership.
contracts-and-errors	strict-boundaries	Treat every remote boundary as untrusted.
dependencies-and-boundaries	component-based	Define provided and required component contracts.
state-and-side-effects	cqrs-event-driven	Make command ownership and projections explicit where justified.
distributed-reliability	eventually-consistent	Define convergence and repair.
performance-and-resources	budget-constrained	Bound fan-out, retries, queues, and timeouts.
testing-strategy	integration-balanced	Exercise failures and cross-component contracts.

Policy

Every fact MUST have an authoritative owner. Delivery and acknowledgement semantics, duplicate handling, ordering scope, staleness, conflict resolution, convergence, and repair MUST be documented. Retries and failover MUST be bounded. Distribution requires independent lifecycle or failure evidence; it is not a modularity shortcut.

Common modifiers are security-sensitive, high-throughput, latency-sensitive, and multi-tenant. This profile does not mandate microservices, messaging, event sourcing, or CQRS.