system-design-estimation

system-design-estimation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard. It costs 51 tokens per session (851 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for estimating how much computing capacity a service needs before choosing its architecture. It covers request volume, storage, network traffic, memory, connections, response time, and availability.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when sizing a new service, choosing infrastructure, checking peak-load capacity, or deciding when caches, queues, or multiple machines may be needed.
Why use it?
It exposes whether a design can handle normal and peak demand before infrastructure is selected. This helps identify the first limit that would prevent a single machine from coping.

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 sizing a new service, choosing infrastructure, checking peak-load capacity, or deciding when caches, queues, or multiple machines may be needed.

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

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-estimation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-estimation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 851 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 $0.00051 $0.00851
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00426
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00170
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00085

Measured 13d ago against content hash 9fccdf2f4400, 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-estimation 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-estimation/SKILL.md · 75 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 75 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Capacity Estimation

Priority: P1 (HIGH)

Estimate before you architect. One order of magnitude decides cache, shard, and queue choices.

Core Formulas

  • average QPS = DAU x actions per user per day / 86,400
  • peak QPS = average QPS x peak factor (default 5x; 20-100x for flash sale, ticket drop, or scheduled push)
  • storage per year = writes per day x record size x 365 x replication factor
  • bandwidth = QPS x payload size (compute ingress and egress separately)
  • working set = hot records x record size, where hot is typically 20% of data serving 80% of reads
  • connections = concurrent users x connections per user; compare against pool and file-descriptor limits

Method

  1. Round every input to one significant figure. Precision here is false precision.
  2. Compute average, then peak, then storage, then bandwidth, then memory.
  3. Compare each result to a known ceiling from estimation numbers: single-node QPS, disk IOPS, NIC throughput, RAM per instance.
  4. Name the shaping quantity - the first number that breaks a single-node ceiling. It dictates the first component added in high-level design.
  5. Restate every assumed input beside the result so a wrong assumption is visible, not buried.

Cost

  • Convert the sized capacity into monthly spend before recommending it: compute, storage plus egress, managed-service premiums, and the multiplier any redundancy applies.
  • Cost is a design constraint, not an afterthought. A topology the budget cannot hold is not a design, it is a proposal to be rejected later.
  • State cost per unit of value where it clarifies: cost per 1k requests, per GB retained, per nine of availability added.

Latency Budget

  • Build the p95 budget as a sum of hops; every remote call spends from one fixed budget.
  • Use order-of-magnitude anchors: memory 100ns, SSD read 100us, same-DC round trip 500us, cross-region round trip 100ms+.
  • A synchronous fan-out of N calls costs the slowest call, not the average. Budget with p99, not the mean.

Read the full file on GitHub · 75 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 · 75 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 9fccdf2f4400

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design-estimation is a skill published in the GitHub repository HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard (565 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 851 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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