system-design

system-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from 05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills. It costs 84 tokens per session (1,159 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for deciding where data lives, how it moves, and how a whole product handles growth, slow work, caching, queues, consistency, and failures.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing a product’s architecture, adding background jobs, webhooks, real-time features, caches, or support for more users.
Why use it?
It prevents unnecessary complexity and replaces guesses about scale with estimates and choices tied to measurable needs.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it when designing a product’s architecture, adding background jobs, webhooks, real-time features, caches, or support for more users.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills/system-design
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.

Any agent
npx skills add 05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills --skill system-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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/skills/05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills/system-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills/system-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills/system-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills/system-design/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for system-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills/system-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills/system-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,159 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 $0.00084 $0.01159
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00580
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00232
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00116

Measured 11d ago against content hash c5195d15462b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, 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 11d 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.

system-design/SKILL.md · 60 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 60 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

System Design

System design is deciding where data lives, how it moves, and what happens when a part fails. Every box you add must justify itself against the two default answers: "put it in Postgres" and "do it synchronously".

Start from numbers, not from patterns

Before proposing any design, estimate — even roughly:

  • Requests/sec at realistic peak (not fantasy scale). Data size now and in 2 years. Read:write ratio. Latency budget for the user-facing path.
  • Most business SaaS runs at <50 rps with <50 GB of hot data. One well-indexed Postgres and one app server handles this with room to spare. Design for 10× current load, not 1000×; you will redesign before 1000× anyway, with better information.

State the numbers in the design. A design without numbers is a mood board.

The escalation ladder — take one step only when the current step measurably fails

  1. Synchronous monolith + Postgres. Correct, debuggable, transactional. Stay here as long as possible.
  2. Read optimization: indexes → query fixes → then caching. Cache only what you've measured as hot and expensive.
  3. Async for slow side-effects: anything the user shouldn't wait for (emails, SMS, PDFs, report generation, webhooks out) moves to a background worker + queue. This is usually the first real architecture step a product needs.
  4. Scheduled work: cron/scheduler for periodic jobs — make every job idempotent and overlap-safe (lock or skip if previous run alive).
  5. Horizontal app scaling: stateless app servers behind a load balancer. Requires: no local file writes (object storage), no in-memory sessions (token/DB), no in-process cron duplication.
  6. Database scaling: connection pooling → read replicas (accepting replica lag on reads that tolerate it) → partitioning by time/tenant. Sharding is the last resort, not a flex.

Caching — the rules that keep it from lying

  • Every cache answers three questions in writing: what is the source of truth? how does invalidation happen? what is the maximum acceptable staleness? "TTL 60s" is a fine answer; "we'll invalidate carefully" is not.
  • Cache aside (read-through) is the default pattern. Never cache anything permission-scoped under a key that lacks the principal/tenant — cache poisoning across tenants is a breach, not a bug.
  • Clear or version caches on auth changes (login/logout) — stale cross-account data is the classic SPA bug.

Read the full file on GitHub · 60 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. 11d ago First seen · 60 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A c5195d15462b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository 05-deepak-patidar/claude-skills (4 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 1,159 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.

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