system-design

system-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from orlando-japan/claude-code-setting. It costs 28 tokens per session (808 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured method for designing a non-trivial service, feature, or subsystem before coding. It covers requirements, capacity estimates, data models, and interfaces, with more design steps continuing in the source.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to scope new systems, estimate traffic and storage, choose data structures, and define how components communicate.
Why use it?
It exposes missing assumptions and technical limits early, making the design easier to review and defend.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

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/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/system-design
Any agent
npx skills add orlando-japan/claude-code-setting --skill system-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/system-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/system-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/system-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/system-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 808 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 5.1 $0.00028 $0.00808
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00404
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00162
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00081

Measured 5d ago against content hash df140b114da0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

system-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 5d 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.

templates/extra/skills/system-design/SKILL.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

System design

The goal is a design you can defend — not the cleverest option, the one that holds up to questioning.

The 6-step frame

1. Clarify requirements

Two lists:

  • Functional: what must the system do? Enumerate the actual user interactions.
  • Non-functional: how fast, how reliable, how much data, how many users, how private?

If you don't have numbers, make them up explicitly: "assume 1k RPS, 10M rows, p99 <200ms." Wrong numbers you can iterate on; absent numbers you can't.

2. Estimate capacity

Back-of-envelope, not precision:

  • Reads / writes per second
  • Storage (rows × average size × retention)
  • Network egress
  • Peak vs steady state

This is where impossible requirements get exposed. "1M writes/sec to a single Postgres instance" stops the conversation before you start coding.

3. Data model

  • What entities? What are their IDs?
  • What relationships? One-to-many, many-to-many, hierarchical?
  • What access patterns? Read by ID, scan by timestamp, aggregate by user?
  • Pick storage to fit. Access patterns drive DB choice, not preference.

4. API / interfaces

  • Inputs and outputs for each operation.
  • Sync vs async (request/response vs queue).
  • Pagination, rate limits, idempotency.
  • Auth and authz model.

5. Architecture sketch

  • Components (services, DBs, queues, caches).
  • Data flow for the two or three most important operations (draw it).
  • Where's the state?
  • What's stateless?
  • Where are the failure domains?

6. Trade-offs and open questions

For each major choice, name the alternative and why you rejected it. Be honest about open questions — "we haven't decided how to handle X" is fine; pretending X is solved is not.

Non-functional thinking

For each requirement, ask: "what does this mean concretely?"

  • "Highly available" → 99.9%? 99.99%? What's the downtime budget? What happens during a region outage?
  • "Scales well" → to what? From what? Vertically? Horizontally? Shardable?
  • "Fast" → p50 or p99? Measured from where?
  • "Secure" → against what threat? From whom?

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 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. 5d ago First seen · 92 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A df140b114da0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository orlando-japan/claude-code-setting (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 808 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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