dist-design

dist-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Langerrr/distributed-architect. It costs 95 tokens per session (623 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for comparing architecture choices in distributed systems, where parts of an application run separately and communicate over a network. It examines requirements, system structure, communication, data ownership, failures, and scaling.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing service boundaries, communication patterns, state management, retry behavior, or ways to handle more traffic.
Why use it?
It helps make design decisions explicit and shows the trade-offs between options such as queues, streams, remote calls, and different scaling approaches.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the distributed-architect plugin — 3 skills shipped together

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/langerrr/distributed-architect/dist-design
Any agent
npx skills add Langerrr/distributed-architect --skill dist-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Langerrr/distributed-architect

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install distributed-architect, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills.

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 dist-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/langerrr/distributed-architect/dist-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/langerrr/distributed-architect/dist-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/langerrr/distributed-architect/dist-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/langerrr/distributed-architect/dist-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 95 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 623 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 $0.00095 $0.00623
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00311
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00125
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00062

Measured today against content hash 8bfd64a8e8d5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dist-design 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 today.

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/dist-design/SKILL.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/dist-design — Design-Time Architecture Analysis

Evaluate architectural options and their trade-offs for distributed system decisions.

Arguments

  • $ARGUMENTS may contain a description of what's being designed

Step 1: Gather Requirements

Understand from $ARGUMENTS or by asking the user:

  • What problem does this solve?
  • What are the constraints (latency, throughput, consistency, fault tolerance)?
  • What components already exist? (load topology file if available)

Step 2: Load Project Topology

Look for a topology file. If it exists, understand the current system shape. If it doesn't, work with whatever architecture context is available.

Step 3: Identify the Design Decision

Categorize what's being decided:

Decision type Examples
Communication pattern Stream vs queue vs RPC, push vs pull, sync vs async
Component boundary Where to split responsibilities, same process vs separate
State management Where state lives, who owns it, consistency model
Failure strategy Retry policy, circuit breakers, fallback behavior, DLQ design
Scaling approach Horizontal vs vertical, partitioning, sharding, replication

Step 4: Enumerate Options

For each viable option, analyze:

a. Topology impact — What cardinality does it introduce? New convergence points? b. Failure analysis — What fails, blast radius, recovery mechanism? c. Concurrency implications — New concurrent access to shared resources? d. Operational cost — Complexity to operate, monitor, debug?

Step 5: Compare and Recommend

Present options side by side:

## Design Analysis: [decision description]

### Option A: [name]
- Topology: [impact]
- Failure modes: [key risks]
- Concurrency: [concerns]
- Operational cost: [assessment]
- Best when: [conditions where this option excels]

### Option B: [name]
- [same structure]

### Recommendation
[Which option and why, given the stated constraints]

### Topology Changes
[How the topology file should be updated if adopted]

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 lines

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. today Changed · +2 lines · +68 tokens per session 8bfd64a8e8d5
  2. 4d ago First seen · 76 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A 0e28d6daf1b4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dist-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository Langerrr/distributed-architect (1 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 95 tokens to every session and 623 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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