system-design-building-blocks

system-design-building-blocks is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard. It costs 61 tokens per session (823 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for choosing infrastructure components such as load balancers, caches, queues, CDNs, API gateways, rate limiters, and consistent hashing based on the specific system constraint they address.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when deciding how to handle overloaded servers, high read or write traffic, background work, large media files, repeated service routing, tenant limits, or changing cache and shard sizes.
Why use it?
It helps avoid adding costly components without a clear reason. Each choice also makes trade-offs such as stale data, delayed work, rebalancing, or central points of failure explicit.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Good fit Use it when deciding how to handle overloaded servers, high read or write traffic, background work, large media files, repeated service routing, tenant limits, or changing cache and shard sizes.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-building-blocks
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 HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard --skill system-design-building-blocks
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard

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-building-blocks

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-building-blocks/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-building-blocks)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-building-blocks"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-building-blocks/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-building-blocks

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-building-blocks"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-building-blocks.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 61 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 823 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00061 $0.00823
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00411
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00165
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00082

Measured 13d ago against content hash 71236855db7b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

system-design-building-blocks 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 13d 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.

.agents/skills/system-design/system-design-building-blocks/SKILL.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

System Building Blocks

Priority: P1 (HIGH)

Add a component only to remove a named constraint. Every component adds failure modes and cost.

Selection Table

Constraint observed Component Cost accepted
One instance saturates CPU or connections Horizontal scaling behind a load balancer Statelessness required; session moves to a store
Read QPS exceeds store ceiling; data tolerates staleness Read-through cache Stale reads up to TTL; invalidation complexity
Write spikes exceed sustainable store throughput Queue plus async worker Eventual completion; needs idempotent consumers
Slow non-critical work blocks the request path Background job or event Extra delivery guarantees to reason about
Static or media bytes dominate egress CDN Cache purge lag; origin still needed for misses
Cross-cutting authn, quota, routing repeated per service API gateway Central chokepoint; must be HA
One tenant or key can exhaust capacity Rate limiter or admission control Rejections need clear client contracts
Cache or shard nodes change count during scaling Consistent hashing Rebalancing logic; hot-key skew persists

Caching Rules

  • Default to cache-aside for read-heavy paths; use write-through only when read-after-write must be exact.
  • Set TTL from tolerable staleness, not from convenience. Every cached key needs a stated TTL and an invalidation trigger.
  • Guard the miss path: single-flight or request coalescing prevents a stampede when a hot key expires.
  • Never cache what you cannot invalidate. Never cache per-user data under a shared key.

Queue Rules

  • Choose delivery semantics explicitly: at-least-once plus idempotent consumers is the safe default.
  • Partition by the entity that must stay ordered; ordering is per partition, never global.
  • Size the queue for the burst, and define the drain rate. An unbounded queue converts a throughput problem into a latency and memory problem.
  • Apply backpressure at the producer when depth exceeds the drain budget; shedding beats silent growth.

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 13d ago First seen · 73 lines · 61 tokens per session scan A 71236855db7b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design-building-blocks is a skill published in the GitHub repository HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard (565 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 823 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 2026-08-30.

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