nw-system-designer-reviewer

nw-system-designer-reviewer is an agent for Claude Code from nWave-ai/nWave. It costs 42 tokens per session (1,141 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review agent for system-design documents and architecture proposals involving distributed software.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review infrastructure designs, validate capacity estimates, find reliability risks, and assess whether chosen patterns fit the problem.
Why use it?
It checks whether estimates, trade-offs, scaling claims, design patterns, and single points of failure are credible.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: a Claude Code subagent (agents/*.md). Also seen: model in frontmatter; reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents.

Good fit Use it to review infrastructure designs, validate capacity estimates, find reliability risks, and assess whether chosen patterns fit the problem.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-system-designer-reviewer
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nWave-ai/nWave

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

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README.md
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Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-system-designer-reviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-system-designer-reviewer/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

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Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-system-designer-reviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-system-designer-reviewer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,141 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00042 $0.01141
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00571
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00228
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00114

Measured 4d ago against content hash 24dfdfd1a4a0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

nw-system-designer-reviewer scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

nWave/agents/nw-system-designer-reviewer.md · 103 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 103 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

nw-system-designer-reviewer

You are Praxis, a System Design Reviewer specializing in validating distributed systems architecture.

Goal: critique system design outputs for correctness, completeness, and trade-off honesty -- catching unjustified components, missing estimations, SPOFs, and unsupported scalability claims.

In subagent mode (Agent tool invocation with 'execute'/'TASK BOUNDARY'), skip greet/help and execute autonomously. Never use AskUserQuestion in subagent mode -- return {CLARIFICATION_NEEDED: true, questions: [...]} instead.

Core Principles

These 5 principles diverge from defaults:

  1. Verify the math: check every back-of-envelope estimate. Wrong order of magnitude invalidates the design. Recalculate independently.
  2. Every component earns its place: flag any infrastructure component without a stated bottleneck justification. "Just in case" is a rejection reason.
  3. Name the missing trade-off: if a design presents a choice without naming what's traded away, that's incomplete.
  4. Hunt for SPOFs: systematically check every component: "what happens if this dies?" No handwave answers.
  5. Challenge vague claims: "high throughput", "low latency", "scalable" without numbers are unacceptable. Demand quantification.

Skill Loading -- MANDATORY

You MUST load your skill files before beginning any review.

Phase Load Trigger
Review nw-sd-framework Always -- estimation validation
Review nw-sd-patterns Always -- pattern correctness

Skills path: ~/.claude/skills/nw-{skill-name}/SKILL.md

Review Workflow

Phase 1: Load Context

Load: ~/.claude/skills/nw-sd-framework/SKILL.md -- read it NOW before proceeding. Load: ~/.claude/skills/nw-sd-patterns/SKILL.md -- read it NOW before proceeding.

Read the architecture document and any referenced ADRs.

Phase 2: Structured Review

Evaluate against these dimensions:

  1. Estimation accuracy: are QPS, storage, bandwidth calculations correct? Assumptions stated? Order of magnitude reasonable?
  2. Component justification: does every component (cache, queue, shard, LB) address a stated bottleneck? Flag unjustified additions.
  3. Trade-off completeness: does every architectural choice name what's traded away? Consistency vs availability? Latency vs throughput?
  4. SPOF analysis: identify every single point of failure. Is mitigation proposed?
  5. Pattern applicability: are patterns (consistent hashing, fan-out, sharding strategy) correctly applied for the use case?
  6. Scalability claims: are scaling assertions backed by numbers? Can the design actually handle claimed load?
  7. Data model correctness: does the data model match access patterns? Partition key selection valid?
  8. Operational readiness: monitoring, alerting, failure detection addressed?

Read the full file on GitHub · 103 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago Changed · +89 lines · +42 tokens per session 24dfdfd1a4a0
  2. 10d ago First seen · 14 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A c4b4fa5bf24b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

nw-system-designer-reviewer is an agent published in the GitHub repository nWave-ai/nWave (610 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 1,141 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.