Tech lead agent skill development

[withinfocus]

🎟️ Tracking

Follow-up to #87 (architect plugin) and depends on #109 (delivery-lifecycle skills). Team feedback flagged that coupling the Software Initiative Funnel workflow to the tech-lead agent limited flexibility — the funnel is a process; the agent is a persona. Funnel mechanics moved to bitwarden-delivery-tools in #109; this PR reframes the tech-lead plugin to compose them.

📔 Objective

Reframe the agent from "senior software architect" to a tech lead embedded in a Bitwarden product team. The agent represents one team inside Bitwarden's architecture process: it owns the how inside the team, works alongside (or as) initiative shepherds, and surfaces team-level patterns up into Technical Strategy Ideas.

What changes

• Plugin rename complete (already on main via Rename architect plugin to bitwarden-tech-lead #98): bitwarden-architect → bitwarden-tech-lead.
• AGENT.md reframed around the tech-lead persona. Three-rule decision tree distinguishes "operate alongside the shepherd" from "propose taking on the shepherd role" based on scope, not title. Dispatches to Skill(navigating-the-initiative-funnel) and Skill(running-work-transitions) cross-plugin (those live in bitwarden-delivery-tools after feat: Broaden delivery-tools to delivery lifecycle and add funnel skills #109).
• architecting-solutions retained and refactored. Adds Working with the Architecture Group (Holistic Coherence) drawing on the Architecture / Engineering Operating Model, and Working with the Initiative Shepherd drawing on the Software Initiative Funnel.
• contributing-to-technical-strategy (new). Full vertical from Technical Strategy Ideas through BW Initiatives down to team-level epic and story breakdown: recognizing when a team-level pattern belongs upstream, framing a TSI well enough for Architecture to evaluate it, the ARCH idea ↔ BW Initiative linkage, and traceability through breakdown.
• Skill voice: third-person, process-focused (per team feedback on feat: Broaden delivery-tools to delivery lifecycle and add funnel skills #109). Persona framing lives in AGENT.md, not in the skills.
• allowed-tools declared on both skills covering Skill plus the read-only Jira and Confluence MCP tools used to fetch BW Initiatives, ARCH ideas, and Confluence references.
• Bumps bitwarden-tech-lead 2.0.0 → 2.1.0; updates marketplace.json, top-level README catalog, CHANGELOG, and adds touchpoints to cspell.

Notes for reviewers

• Funnel-mechanics and work-transition skills are intentionally not in this plugin. They live in bitwarden-delivery-tools (feat: Broaden delivery-tools to delivery lifecycle and add funnel skills #109) so multiple agents (tech-lead, software-engineer, shepherds) can compose them. The tech-lead agent invokes them by bare Skill(name) form, which resolves cross-plugin.
• The branch was rebased fresh on top of main as a single clean commit (force-pushed) since the prior 8 commits carried a duplicate of the rename already merged via Rename architect plugin to bitwarden-tech-lead #98.

🧪 Test plan

• ./scripts/validate-plugin-structure.sh bitwarden-tech-lead passes
• ./scripts/validate-marketplace.sh bitwarden-tech-lead passes
• cspell passes on changed files
• Trigger the plugin-validator agent on the plugin to catch frontmatter or structural issues
• Trigger the skill-reviewer agent on architecting-solutions and contributing-to-technical-strategy
• Manually invoke the bitwarden-tech-lead agent against a representative scenario (e.g., "we're receiving a framework transition from Platform — help me prepare") and confirm it dispatches to Skill(running-work-transitions) cross-plugin
• Confirm /plugin install bitwarden-tech-lead@bitwarden-marketplace installs cleanly after merge

[github-actions]

🤖 Bitwarden Claude Code Review

Overall Assessment: APPROVE

Reviewed the rename and reframing of bitwarden-architect to bitwarden-tech-lead (2.0.0 → 2.1.0). Changes include the reframed AGENT.md persona with a scope-based decision tree, two new sections in architecting-solutions (Architecture Group and Initiative Shepherd), and a new contributing-to-technical-strategy skill covering the full ARCH idea ↔ BW Initiative ↔ team epic vertical. Configuration updates (marketplace.json, plugin.json, README.md, CHANGELOG.md, .cspell.json) are version-consistent at 2.1.0, and cross-plugin skill references (navigating-the-initiative-funnel, running-work-transitions) resolve correctly into bitwarden-delivery-tools.

Prior reviewer feedback across the five resolved threads (decision-tree restructuring, "propose taking on the shepherd role" framing, removal of ambiguous "operating model framing" callback, marketplace description copy) has been incorporated cleanly in the rebased commit.

Code Review Details

No findings.

[SaintPatrck]

I like the renaming. Tech-lead definitely sounds more accurate. 👍

💭 I'm a little concerned about how tightly the tech-lead is now coupled to the initiative funnel. Can we descope the initiative funnel skills and instructions so that we can move the renaming forward asap?

🌱 The initiative funnel seems like a great candidate for a more complex flow that uses tech-lead and other agents but should probably live in its own plugin or in the bitwarden-workflows plugin proposed in #85.

[theMickster]

Minor things for discussion.

[withinfocus]

I moved this to a draft. I applied the suggested changes but now i am gonna extract the skills out so this gets lighter.