system-design-principles

system-design-principles is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from HoangNguyen0403/agent-skills-standard. It costs 51 tokens per session (726 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of software architecture guidelines for deciding module boundaries, data ownership, dependency direction, communication methods, and failure behavior. It also describes common principles such as keeping one source of truth and allowing safe parts of a system to continue when secondary services fail.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing features, splitting services or modules, choosing between direct requests and background events, handling failing dependencies, or recording trade-offs in an architecture decision record.
Why use it?
It helps teams make explicit architecture decisions and reduce tangled dependencies, unclear ownership, and cascading failures between services.

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 features, splitting services or modules, choosing between direct requests and background events, handling failing dependencies, or recording trade-offs in an architecture decision record.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-principles
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-principles
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-principles

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hoangnguyen0403/agent-skills-standard/system-design-principles.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 726 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 $0.00726
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00363
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00145
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00073

Measured 13d ago against content hash f5b25c01c147, 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-principles 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-principles/SKILL.md · 80 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 80 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

System Design Principles

Priority: P0 (CRITICAL)

Workflow: Evaluate Architecture for New Feature

  1. Identify bounded contexts and module boundaries
  2. Name the data owner and define dependency direction (outer layers depend on inner)
  3. Select communication pattern (sync REST, async event, or hybrid) and failure behavior
  4. Validate CAP trade-offs only for distributed components
  5. Record boundary, trade-off, and rollback in an ADR

For a failing synchronous dependency, keep the critical path explicit: timeout and circuit-break the dependency, return a defined degraded/fallback result where safe, and move non-critical notifications to an asynchronous event.

Architectural Principles

  • SoC: Divide into distinct sections per concern.
  • SSOT: One source, reference elsewhere.
  • Fail Fast: Fail visibly when errors occur.
  • Graceful Degradation: Core functional even if secondary fails.

Modularity & Coupling

  • High Cohesion: Related functionality in one module.
  • Loose Coupling: Use interfaces for communication.
  • DI: Inject dependencies, don't hardcode.

See implementation examples for dependency flow diagrams.

Common Patterns

  • Layered: Presentation -> Logic -> Data.
  • Event-Driven: Async communication between decoupled components.
  • Clean/Hexagonal: Core logic independent of frameworks.
  • Statelessness: Favor stateless for scaling/testing.
  • Monolith first: Start modular-monolith; split a service out only when a module needs independent scaling, release cadence, or ownership.

Distributed Systems

Read the full file on GitHub · 80 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 13d ago First seen · 80 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A f5b25c01c147

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design-principles 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 726 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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