system-design

system-design is a cursor rule for Cursor from kok-o/koko-contextos-agents. It costs 0 tokens per session (3,345 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for designing backend systems by considering scale, data size, speed, reliability, and deployment before coding. It covers common patterns such as load balancing, caching, and splitting data across servers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan or review backend architecture, estimate traffic and storage needs, choose consistency and availability trade-offs, and evaluate system design patterns.
Why use it?
It helps expose trade-offs that are easy to miss when designing only for today's traffic. That reduces the risk of an application becoming unreliable as usage or data grows.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Written for Cursor: installed under .cursor/.

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/kok-o/koko-contextos-agents/system-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kok-o/koko-contextos-agents

Made for: Cursor.

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.

agentmods badge for system-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/kok-o/koko-contextos-agents/system-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/kok-o/koko-contextos-agents/system-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/kok-o/koko-contextos-agents/system-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/kok-o/koko-contextos-agents/system-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 3,345 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00000 $0.03345
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01673
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00669
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00334

Measured today against content hash c4e1da091d23, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

system-design 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 today.

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.

.cursor/rules/system-design.mdc · 420 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 420 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: system-design

system-design

Overview

A brief summary of what the skill does and its core philosophy.

When to Use

Context for when this skill is applicable.

Rules & Patterns

Based on donnemartin/system-design-primer — the most starred system design resource on GitHub.

Core Principle

Everything is a trade-off. Before writing a single line of backend code, reason through the system at scale. A flat monolith that works now fails at 10× load.


Mandatory Pre-Design Checklist

Before architecting any backend system, answer these questions:

  1. Scale: What is the expected QPS (queries per second)? Peak vs average?
  2. Data volume: How much data? Growth rate? 1GB? 1TB? 1PB?
  3. Consistency vs Availability: Can we tolerate eventual consistency? (CAP theorem)
  4. Read/Write ratio: Is it read-heavy (cache it!) or write-heavy (shard it!)?
  5. Latency requirements: Real-time (<100ms)? Near-real-time (<1s)? Batch?
  6. Global distribution: Single region or multi-region?
  7. Deployment model: Traditional servers, Serverless, or Edge functions?

Core Architecture Patterns

Load Balancing

Clients → Load Balancer → [App Server 1, App Server 2, App Server N]
  • Use Round Robin for stateless services
  • Use Least Connections for varying request times
  • Use IP Hash for session affinity (or move sessions to Redis)
  • Always add health checks — remove unhealthy nodes automatically

Rule: Any service expecting > 1000 RPS needs a load balancer. No exceptions.

Caching Strategy

App → [Cache Layer: Redis/Memcached] → Database

Cache decision ladder (check in order):

  1. Is it read > write? → Cache it
  2. Is it expensive to compute? → Cache it
  3. Is it user-specific? → Cache with user key
  4. Is it global? → Shared cache, shorter TTL

Cache patterns:

  • Cache-aside (lazy loading): check cache → miss → load DB → write cache
  • Write-through: write to DB AND cache simultaneously (consistency > performance)
  • Write-behind: write to cache → async flush to DB (performance > consistency)

Read the full file on GitHub · 420 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. today Changed · +38 lines c4e1da091d23
  2. 5d ago First seen · 382 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A b8dad5f3e59f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository kok-o/koko-contextos-agents (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 3,345 tokens. 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 2026-08-31.

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