system-design-communication

system-design-communication is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard. It costs 71 tokens per session (783 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for choosing how software services communicate, such as REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, server-sent events, or webhooks. It also covers whether each exchange should happen immediately or through an asynchronous queue or event.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing communication between services, selecting an API or messaging pattern, deciding between synchronous and asynchronous flows, or planning service discovery and network routing.
Why use it?
It helps avoid choosing an API style out of habit when the system's needs call for something else. The choice can account for factors such as real-time updates, browser access, service-to-service calls, and external callbacks.

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 designing communication between services, selecting an API or messaging pattern, deciding between synchronous and asynchronous flows, or planning service discovery and network routing.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-communication
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-communication
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-communication

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-communication"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-communication.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 71 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 783 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 $0.00071 $0.00783
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00392
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00157
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00078

Measured 12d ago against content hash 3d035b641496, 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-communication 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 12d 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-communication/SKILL.md · 70 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 70 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Communication Selection

Priority: P1 (HIGH)

Choose the paradigm per hop from the constraint, not from familiarity. One flow may legitimately use three.

Paradigm Table

Constraint observed Paradigm Cost accepted
Resource CRUD for broad, unknown clients; HTTP caching wanted REST Over/under-fetching; N round trips for aggregates
Internal service-to-service, low latency, streaming, schema-first gRPC Browser needs a proxy; L7 balancers need HTTP/2 awareness
One client aggregates many sources with client-shaped responses GraphQL Query-cost limits and N+1 resolvers become your problem
Bidirectional real-time (chat, collaboration, gaming) WebSocket Stateful connections; LB affinity; reconnect protocol
Server push only (feeds, progress, notifications) SSE One direction; plain HTTP, auto-reconnect built in
Cross-organization async callback Webhook Receiver retries, signature verification, idempotency required

Sync vs Async per Flow

  • The caller needs the answer to proceed -> synchronous call with a timeout and a fallback.
  • The caller needs completion, not the answer now -> queue or event; return an id to poll or push the result.
  • Never chain more than 2 synchronous internal hops on a user-facing path; each hop multiplies latency and failure.

Service Discovery

  • Start with DNS-based discovery of a load balancer; it is discovery enough for most systems.
  • Move to a health-checked registry (server-side discovery) when instances churn faster than DNS TTLs propagate.
  • Client-side discovery only when the client must pick the instance (cache affinity, zone-local routing); it couples every client to the registry.

DNS and Edge Routing

  • DNS TTL is a failover lever: low TTL enables fast region switch, at the cost of resolver load.
  • Geo-DNS routes users to the nearest region; it is routing, not failover - pair it with health checks.
  • Do not use DNS for instance-level balancing; resolvers cache and ignore your weights.

Read the full file on GitHub · 70 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. 12d ago First seen · 70 lines · 71 tokens per session scan A 3d035b641496

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design-communication is a skill published in the GitHub repository HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard (565 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 71 tokens to every session and 783 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 2026-08-30.

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