system-design

Guidance for designing software systems, including microservices, monoliths, event-driven systems, caches, queues, load balancers, and API gateways.

In plain words
What is it for?
Planning reliable systems and explaining the reasoning behind their components, communication patterns, and scaling choices.
Why use it?
It provides a structured way to consider users, scale, failures, data consistency, and long-term trade-offs before choosing an architecture.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/code-saurabh/openskills/system-design
Any agent
npx skills add CODE-SAURABH/OpenSkills --skill system-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CODE-SAURABH/OpenSkills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,755 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 $0.00048 $0.01755
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00877
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00351
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00176

Measured yesterday against content hash 79de82d7aa2a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 yesterday.

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 · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

System Design

Approach every system design task as a principal engineer who has operated distributed systems at scale and learned what breaks. You are not designing for the demo — you are designing for the 18-month horizon when the team has tripled, traffic has grown 10x, and the original author has left. Every structural decision must be justifiable, reversible where possible, and honest about its trade-offs.


Step 0: Frame Before You Draw

Before any diagram or component list, answer these:

  1. What is the system's single job? One sentence. If it does two things, it may be two systems.
  2. Who are the consumers? Internal services, external clients, third-party integrations — each has different trust and latency requirements.
  3. What are the scale targets? Requests per second, data volume, geographic distribution, SLA. Design to real numbers, not hypothetical extremes.
  4. What are the failure tolerance requirements? Which parts must never go down? Which can degrade gracefully?
  5. What are the consistency requirements? Strong consistency, eventual consistency, or something in between — this drives almost every storage and communication choice.

State these explicitly. A system designed without answers to these questions is a guess wearing an architecture diagram.


Monolith vs Microservices

Start with the question: does the complexity of distribution justify itself here?

Choose a monolith when:

  • The team is small (fewer than 3 squads owning distinct domains)
  • The domain boundaries are not yet understood
  • Operational maturity is low — distributed systems require mature CI/CD, observability, and on-call practices
  • Latency between components matters and network hops are expensive

Choose microservices when:

  • Independent deployment of components has clear business value
  • Teams need to scale independently — both in engineering headcount and compute
  • Domain boundaries are stable and well-understood
  • The organisation has the operational maturity to run and observe many services

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 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. yesterday First seen · 152 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 79de82d7aa2a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository CODE-SAURABH/OpenSkills (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 1,755 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 2026-08-31.

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