system-architecture-document

A guide to how a complete software system is structured, how its parts and outside services communicate, how data moves, and why key design choices were made. It can include diagrams and constraints such as security, speed, or availability requirements.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to document a whole system or major subsystem, explain integrations and data flows, record design decisions, and identify required system qualities.
Why use it?
It gives product, engineering, and infrastructure teams a common view of a system before they change or extend it.

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/fattain-naime/engineering-docs/system-architecture-document
Any agent
npx skills add fattain-naime/engineering-docs --skill system-architecture-document
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fattain-naime/engineering-docs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,402 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 $0.00054 $0.03402
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.01701
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00680
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00340

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5b32b461bdf2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

system-architecture-document 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 2d 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.

skills/system-architecture-document/SKILL.md · 273 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 273 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Produce a System Architecture Document (SAD) that gives every stakeholder - from non-technical product leadership to infrastructure engineers - the right level of detail about the system's structure. This document answers:

  • What components make up the system?
  • How do they communicate?
  • Why was the architecture designed this way?
  • Where does data flow and where are the trust boundaries?
  • What are the non-functional constraints the architecture must satisfy?

Input

Works best with: The name of the system or subsystem being documented. Also valuable: Existing diagrams, technology stack decisions, known integration points, existing ADRs, NFR targets.

Example invocation: Create a system architecture document for PayFlow, a multi-brand payment gateway with a PHP 8.3 backend, MySQL database, custom plugin system, and white-label domain routing.

Key Concepts

C4 Model (Simon Brown)

The C4 Model provides a hierarchical, developer-friendly approach to architecture documentation - like a "Google Maps" with multiple zoom levels:

  • Level 1: System Context - The system's place in the world. Users and external systems. Intended for all stakeholders.
  • Level 2: Container - The major deployable units (web apps, APIs, databases, queues). Intended for technical leads and architects.
  • Level 3: Component - The internal structure of a container (controllers, services, repositories). Intended for developers.
  • Level 4: Code - Class/function level. Usually omitted as IDEs serve this better.

Always use Mermaid for diagrams to keep them version-controllable.

4+1 View Model (Kruchten)

Five complementary views of the same architecture:

  • Logical View - Functional decomposition (classes, modules, layers)
  • Process View - Runtime behavior, concurrency, synchronization
  • Development View - Code organization, modules, packages
  • Deployment / Physical View - Infrastructure, nodes, network topology
  • Scenarios (+1) - Key use cases that validate the other four views

Read the full file on GitHub · 273 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 2d ago First seen · 273 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 5b32b461bdf2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-architecture-document is a skill published in the GitHub repository fattain-naime/engineering-docs (4 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 3,402 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 2026-08-31.

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