Art Of War Software Engineering
Use before any major initiative, architecture decision, or competitive strategy choice. Triggers on "should we build this?", "how do we compete?", "is the timing right?", or when evaluating resource allocation. Scores five parallel factors (Tao/Heaven/Earth/Command/Method) → go/caution/stop verdict.
Install
$ agentstack add skill-kinhluan-skills-art-of-war-software-engineering ✓ scanned · ✓ verified — works with Claude Code, Cursor, and more.
Security review
✓ PassedNo issues found. Passed automated security review. · v0.1.0 How review works →
- ✓ Prompt-injection patterns
- ✓ Secret / credential exfiltration
- ✓ Dangerous shell & filesystem operations
- ✓ Untrusted network calls
- ✓ Known-malicious package signatures
What it can access
- ✓ Network access No
- ✓ Filesystem access No
- ✓ Shell / process execution No
- ✓ Environment & secrets No
- ✓ Dynamic code execution No
From automated source analysis of v0.1.0. “Used” means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it’s unsafe.
About
⚔️ Art of War for Software Engineering
"The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought." — Sun Tzu
Without this framework, teams commit to initiatives with hidden weaknesses — wrong timing, technical terrain that can't support the feature, no clear ownership, or engineers building without knowing why. The Five Factors surface these risks before resources are spent.
🏛️ The Five Fundamental Factors (Ngũ Sự)
Five parallel evaluation criteria. Score all simultaneously — not a sequential pipeline.
1. Tao (道 — The Way)
Definition: Shared vision and alignment between stakeholders and the engineering team.
- Software Mapping: Does every engineer know why we are building this? →
why-strategic-rationale - Check: Can any engineer articulate the business value without reading a doc?
| Score | Signal | |---|---| | 1–3 | No WHY Statement. Direction changes weekly. Engineers "just completing tickets". | | 4–6 | Some alignment but different team members give different answers to "why". | | 7–10 | Clear WHY Statement + JTBD defined. All engineers can articulate business value. |
**If score 6 months to change core component. No CI/CD. | | 4–6 | Some debt, partially modular. Deploy takes days. Inconsistent test coverage. | | 7–10 | Clean C4/DDD architecture. Loosely coupled. Core Domain isolated. Deploy "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."
Know yourself: Audit team capabilities, tech debt (Earth), Core Domain boundaries. Know your enemy: Run problem-discovery — customer interviews + LMR (job board scan) + competitor analysis. Competitor analysis reveals the beachhead niche.
DO: Complete problem-discovery before defining JTBD. DON'T: Substitute SWOT gut-feel for actual market signals. Assumptions are not intelligence.
2. "Win Without Fighting" (The Sheathed Sword)
> "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
For every feature, ask: Core Domain or Generic Subdomain?
- Generic Subdomain → buy SaaS (Auth → Auth0, Payments → Stripe, Email → SendGrid)
- Core Domain → build with full engineering investment
DO: Default to SaaS for anything outside Core Domain. DON'T: Build Generic Subdomains. Every one you build steals engineering energy from your Core Domain — the only place you can actually win.
3. "Avoid Strength, Attack Weakness"
> "Water runs away from high places and hastens downwards."
Strength = dominant competitors with moats, or your own legacy codebase. Weakness = underserved niches competitors ignore, new isolated microservices vs. monolith.
DO: Identify underserved segment from problem-discovery competitor analysis → use as beachhead. Dominate that niche completely, then cross the Chasm (diffusion-release-tracking). Target Early Adopters first. DON'T: Compete head-on with dominant player. Don't refactor a massive monolith when you can build isolated new value instead.
4. "Binh Như Nước" — Water Strategy (Adaptability)
> "Shape your flow according to the nature of the ground over which it flows."
DO: Ship behind feature flags. Maintain high Deployment Frequency (dora-core). Keep architecture loosely coupled. DON'T: Build tightly coupled monoliths or plan big-bang releases. Frozen water cannot flow — when Heaven (market) changes, you must be able to pivot.
🔄 Integrated Workflow
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 🛡️ LAYER 0 — NGŨ SỰ AUDIT (Score all 5 in parallel) │
│ │
│ Tao 道 ──→ Heaven 天 ──→ Earth 地 ──→ Command 將 ──→ Method 法 │
│ WHY clear? Timing? Terrain? DRI? Pipeline? │
│ │ │ │ │ │ │
│ └─────────────┴────────────┴──────────────┴──────────────┘ │
│ │ │
│ ▼ │
│ ┌───────────────┐ │
│ │ Assessment │ │
│ │ Total /50 │ │
│ └───────┬───────┘ │
│ │ │
│ ┌─────────────┼─────────────┐ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ ▼ ▼ ▼ │
│ ┌──────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ │
│ │ < 30 │ │ 30–39 │ │ 40–50 │ │
│ │ STOP │ │CAUTION │ │PROCEED │ │
│ │ Fix 2│ │ Fix 1 │ │ │ │
│ │lowest│ │ lowest │ │ │ │
│ └──────┘ └────────┘ └────────┘ │
│ │ │ │
│ └──────────────→ re-assess─┘ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 📡 LAYER 1 — KNOW YOURSELF / ENEMY (problem-discovery) │
│ │
│ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ │
│ │ Customer │ │ Lean Validation │ │ LMR + Competitor │ │
│ │ Interviews │ │ Landing page / │ │ Scan │ │
│ │ (Blank 2005) │ │ Smoke test │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ (Ries 2011) │ │ │ │
│ └────────┬─────────┘ └────────┬─────────┘ └────────┬─────────┘ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ └─────────────────────┼─────────────────────┘ │
│ ▼ │
│ ┌─────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ Problem Statement │ │
│ │ + Beachhead Niche │ │
│ └───────────┬─────────────┘ │
└────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 🎯 LAYER 2 — ESTABLISH TAO (why-strategic-rationale) │
│ │
│ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ │
│ │ VPC │───→│ PR/FAQ │───→│ WHY Statement │ │
│ │ Value Proposition│ │ Working Backwards│ │ + Kill Criteria │ │
│ │ (Osterwalder) │ │ (Amazon) │ │ │ │
│ └──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └────────┬─────────┘ │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 📋 LAYER 3 — JTBD → VALUE PROP → PMR (business-product-leadership) │
│ │
│ Value Prop Statement: "[Product] helps [Customer] [solve Problem] │
│ by [Approach], resulting in [Gain]" │
│ │ │
│ ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ ▼ ▼ ▼ │
│ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ │
│ │ JTBD #1 │ │ JTBD #2 │ │ JTBD #3 │ │
│ │When [S],│ │When [S],│ │(optional)│ │
│ │want [M],│ │want [M],│ │ │ │
│ │can [O] │ │can [O] │ │ │ │
│ └────┬────┘ └────┬────┘ └────┬────┘ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ └──────────────┼──────────────┘ │
│ ▼ │
│ ┌─────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ Product Market Research │ │
│ │ Validate each JTBD │ │
│ └───────────┬─────────────┘ │
│ ┌───────────┼───────────┐ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ ▼ ▼ ▼ │
│ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ │
│ │ GO │ │ DEFER │ │ NO-GO │ │
│ │ Include │ │ Add to │ │ Kill │ │
│ │ in MVP │ │ Roadmap │ │ Criteria│ │
│ └────┬────┘ └─────────┘ └─────────┘ │
└───────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 🗺️ LAYER 4 — MAP EARTH (c4-model + ddd-core) │
│ │
│ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ │
│ │ C4 L1–L3 │───→│ DDD Strategic + │ │
│ │ (Simon Brown) │ │ Tactical (Evans) │ │
│ └──────────────────┘ └─────────┬────────┘ │
│ │ │
│ ▼ │
│ ┌─────────────────┐ │
│ │ Core Domain or │ │
│ │ Generic? │ │
│ └────────┬────────┘ │
│ ┌───────────────┴───────────────┐ │
│ │ │ │
│ ▼ ▼ │
│ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ │
│ │ Generic │ │ Core Domain │ │
│ │ Buy / SaaS │ │ Build │ │
│ │ Win without │ │ Full eng │ │
│ │ fighting │ │ investment │ │
│ └───────┬───────┘ └───────┬───────┘ │
└────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────┘
│ │
└───────────────┬───────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 💧 LAYER 5 — WATER STRATEGY (collaborative-engineering-agent + diffusion) │
│ │
│ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ │
│ │ Feature Flags │───→│ Early Adopters │ │
│ │ Dark Launch │ │ (Rogers 1962) │ │
│ │ (Fowler 2010) │ └────────┬─────────┘ │
│ └──────────────────┘ │ │
│ ▼ │
│ ┌─────────────────┐ │
│ │ The Chasm │ │
│ │ (Moore 1991) │ │
│ └────────┬────────┘ │
│ │ Cross │
│ ▼ │
│ ┌─────────────────┐ │
│ │ Early Majority │───→ Late Majority │
│ └─────────────────┘ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 📊 LAYER 6 — MEASURE & ADAPT (dora-core + product-analytics) │
│ │
│ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ │
│ │ DORA Metrics │───→│ Market Signal │ │
│ │ DF·LT·CFR·MTTR │ └────────┬─────────┘ │
│ │ (Forsgren et al) │ │ │
│ └──────────────────┘ │ │
│ ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ ▼ ▼ ▼ │
│ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ │
│ │ Pivot │ │ Refine │ │ Kill │ │
│ │ → VPC │ │ JTBD │ │ → Criteria│ │
│ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ │
│ │ │ │
│ └────────────────→ re-assess ───────────────────┘ │
│
…
## Source & license
This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.
- **Author:** [kinhluan](https://github.com/kinhluan)
- **Source:** [kinhluan/skills](https://github.com/kinhluan/skills)
- **License:** MIT
Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.
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Versions
- v0.1.0 Imported from the upstream source.