principle-distributed-systems

principle-distributed-systems is a skill for Claude Code from lugassawan/swe-workbench. It costs 96 tokens per session (1,682 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to designing systems that run across multiple computers or services. It explains trade-offs between consistency, availability, speed, failures, and coordination.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when choosing consistency rules, coordinating nodes, splitting data, electing leaders, or making operations safe to repeat.
Why use it?
Distributed systems can fail in partial and unpredictable ways, so seemingly simple choices can cause stale data, conflicting updates, or outages.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the swe-workbench plugin — 60 skills, 25 commands, 22 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when choosing consistency rules, coordinating nodes, splitting data, electing leaders…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/lugassawan/swe-workbench/principle-distributed-systems
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 lugassawan/swe-workbench --skill principle-distributed-systems
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/lugassawan/swe-workbench

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install swe-workbench, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 60 skills, 25 commands, 22 agents, 4 hooks.

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 principle-distributed-systems

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lugassawan/swe-workbench/principle-distributed-systems.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/lugassawan/swe-workbench/principle-distributed-systems)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lugassawan/swe-workbench/principle-distributed-systems"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lugassawan/swe-workbench/principle-distributed-systems.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,682 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.
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 $0.00096 $0.01682
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00841
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00336
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00168

Measured 3d ago against content hash 126da5f7861b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-distributed-systems 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 3d 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.

skills/principle-distributed-systems/SKILL.md · 121 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 121 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Distributed Systems

Multi-node systems fail partially and non-deterministically. Every design decision spans a space of consistency, availability, and latency trade-offs — name them explicitly.

CAP and PACELC

CAP: under a network Partition, choose Consistency or Availability — you cannot guarantee both.

PACELC extends this to normal operation: even without a partition, every request trades Latency for Consistency. Always name both axes: "This is AP/EL — available under partition, latency-favoured otherwise."

Common placements: Cassandra (AP/EL), HBase (CP/EC), Spanner (CP/EC via TrueTime), DynamoDB (AP/EL by default, tunable).

Consistency Models

Ordered strongest → weakest:

Model Promise
Linearizable Reads always see the most recent committed write; operations appear atomic. Requires consensus.
Sequential All nodes observe operations in the same order, not necessarily wall-clock order.
Causal Causally related writes are observed in order; concurrent writes may diverge.
Read-your-writes A client always reads its own most recent write (single-session).
Monotonic reads A client never reads a value older than one it already read.
Eventual All replicas converge given sufficient time and no new writes.

Choose the weakest model that satisfies correctness. Most user-facing apps need only read-your-writes + monotonic reads; linearizability is expensive.

Time, Clocks, and Ordering

Physical clocks drift — never use wall-clock timestamps to order events across nodes.

  • Lamport timestamps: logical counter incremented on send/receive. Establishes causal order; cannot detect concurrency.
  • Vector clocks: per-node counters. Detect both causality (a → b) and concurrency (a ∥ b). Used by Riak.
  • Hybrid Logical Clocks (HLC): monotonically increasing, stays close to physical time. Used by CockroachDB.
  • TrueTime (Spanner): GPS + atomic clocks with bounded uncertainty interval; enables external consistency.

Read the full file on GitHub · 121 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. 3d ago First seen · 121 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 126da5f7861b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-distributed-systems is a skill published in the GitHub repository lugassawan/swe-workbench (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 1,682 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 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

code-forge

Generate implementation code from an approved design blueprint or verbal requirements. Composes context anchoring, architecture, clean code, DDD, security, and test quality into an inside-out implementation workflow. Use when moving from design to code, implementing approved contracts, or when the user says…

techygarg/lattice · 81 tokens

slack-block-kit

Proactively apply when generating Slack API payloads with blocks, chat.postMessage calls with structured content, streaming AI responses, or views.open/views.publish calls. Triggers on Block Kit, Slack blocks, section block, actions block, header block, context block, alert block, card block, carousel block, container…

ccheney/robust-skills · 212 tokens

clean-ddd-hexagonal

Proactively apply when designing APIs, microservices, or scalable backend structure. Triggers on DDD, Clean Architecture, Hexagonal, ports and adapters, entities, value objects, domain events, CQRS, event sourcing, repository pattern, use cases, onion architecture, outbox pattern, aggregate root, anti-corruption…

ccheney/robust-skills · 120 tokens

postgres-drizzle

Proactively apply when creating APIs, backends, or data models. Triggers on PostgreSQL, Postgres, Drizzle, drizzle-orm, drizzle-kit, database, schema, pgTable, tables, columns, indexes, queries, migrations, ORM, relations, relational queries, joins, transactions, SQL, connection pooling, PgBouncer, N+1, JSONB, RLS…

ccheney/robust-skills · 119 tokens

functions-development

Build serverless Go or Python functions for Falcon Foundry apps. TRIGGER when user asks to "create a function", "write a serverless function", "build backend logic", runs foundry functions create, or needs help with FDK handler patterns, function testing, or collection integration from functions. Also TRIGGER when…

CrowdStrike/foundry-skills · 195 tokens

go-expert

Use when writing or reviewing Go backend services - go.mod, .go files, net/http handlers, pgx/sqlc database code, goroutines, context.Context plumbing, or failing go test runs. Builds HTTP APIs on the Go 1.22+ stdlib router, fixes error-wrapping and context-cancellation bugs, designs leak-free goroutine lifecycles…

Aarvion-AI/stackwise-skills · 117 tokens