arc42ify
arc42 docs as an agent skill
Give the skill a repo, a product idea or a few loose notes, and it writes complete arc42 architecture docs: all 12 chapters in Markdown, plus clean SVG diagrams instead of the usual Mermaid boxes.
Runs in Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex. Needs Python 3, nothing else.
Install in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add Chris-Koenig/arc42ify
/plugin install arc42ify@arc42ifyWhy I built this
My last post was about a friend, 52, whose CV reads like the feature list of an AI tool. That applies to a lot of people whose strength is getting demanding work done cleanly. Me included.
For me, it was architecture documentation with arc42, the standard many companies use to describe how their software is built. I was really proud of that. Today an agent does it.
What changes in the business. What used to take expert knowledge and a lot of time, a tool can do now. The tool handles the creating. A person still has to judge the result: is it right, does it fit the company, and can you defend it in front of customers and management? That takes experience, and experience is becoming more valuable.
My AI transformation. My main task has become a different one: I build tools that do my work instead of doing it myself. It’s a loop. Wherever something costs me time, I build a tool for it, and the tool gets better with every correction. arc42ify is one of them.
How it feels. Strange, at first. What I was proud of is now done by a tool. These days I’m proud of something else: the tools themselves, and being able to tell whether their output is right.
I told my friend to build something real. I’m holding myself to that, and what comes out of it goes into my working log.