system-design-interview

system-design-interview is a skill for Claude Code from cnfeat/top-pm-skills. It costs 69 tokens per session (1,626 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A step-by-step format for designing a software system, either for a system-design interview or a real architecture discussion. It covers requirements, scale estimates, major components, detailed design choices, and trade-offs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design systems such as URL shorteners or notification services, prepare for interviews, or document an architecture decision at a chosen scale.
Why use it?
It keeps architecture discussions focused and makes important assumptions and compromises visible before implementation begins.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the pm-engineering plugin — 37 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to design systems such as URL shorteners or notification services, prepare for interviews, or document an architecture decision at a chosen scale.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/system-design-interview
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 cnfeat/top-pm-skills --skill system-design-interview
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cnfeat/top-pm-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pm-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 37 skills.

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-interview

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/system-design-interview/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/system-design-interview)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/system-design-interview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/system-design-interview/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-interview

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/system-design-interview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/system-design-interview.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,626 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 $0.00069 $0.01626
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00813
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00325
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00163

Measured 6d ago against content hash 26d3170d3e74, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

system-design-interview 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 6d 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.

参考skill/pm-claude-skills-main/pm-claude-skills-main/plugins/pm-engineering/skills/system-design-interview/SKILL.md · 142 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 142 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

System Design Interview Skill

Structures a complete, interview-grade system design response — covering clarifying questions, requirements, capacity estimates, architecture, component design, and trade-offs. Works equally well for real architecture sessions.

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

  • The system to design (e.g. "design a URL shortener", "design a notification service", "design Twitter's feed")
  • Scope (interview prep / real architecture decision / practice run)
  • Scale target (rough numbers: DAU, requests/sec, data volume — or "assume typical web scale")
  • Constraints or priorities (e.g. prioritise availability over consistency, minimise cost, low-latency reads)
  • Time available (interview context only: 30 / 45 / 60 minutes — skip for real architecture sessions)
  • Emphasis (optional — any area to go deeper on, e.g. "focus on the DB design" or "spend more time on scaling")

Output Format

1. Clarifying Questions

Before designing, list 4–6 questions that would change the design. Examples:

  • Read-heavy or write-heavy? (affects caching and DB choice)
  • Global or single-region? (affects latency requirements)
  • Strong or eventual consistency? (affects storage and replication)
  • Acceptable latency targets? (p50 / p99)
  • Any existing infrastructure constraints?

Then proceed with stated assumptions if answering an interview question.

2. Functional Requirements

Core features (must have):

  • [Feature 1]
  • [Feature 2]
  • [Feature 3]

Out of scope (for this design):

  • [What's deliberately excluded and why]

3. Non-Functional Requirements

Requirement Target
Availability [e.g. 99.9% / 99.99%]
Latency [e.g. p95 < 100ms for reads]
Throughput [e.g. 10k writes/sec peak]
Consistency [Strong / Eventual]
Durability [e.g. 99.999% — no data loss]

4. Capacity Estimation

Traffic:

  • DAU: [X]
  • Reads/sec: [X] (peak: [X])
  • Writes/sec: [X] (peak: [X])

Storage:

  • Per record size: [X bytes]
  • Records per day: [X]
  • 5-year storage: [X GB/TB]

Read the full file on GitHub · 142 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. 6d ago First seen · 142 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A 26d3170d3e74

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design-interview is a skill published in the GitHub repository cnfeat/top-pm-skills (48 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 1,626 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-03.

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