engineering-system-designer

engineering-system-designer is a skill for Claude Code from PeterHdd/agent-skills. It costs 72 tokens per session (2,773 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing distributed software: systems made of multiple services or components that work together across machines or networks. It covers requirements, capacity, data flow, reliability, and architecture decisions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create system designs, component diagrams, capacity estimates, database and API plans, failure analysis, architecture records, and monolith-to-service migration plans.
Why use it?
It helps expose scaling limits, failure risks, and trade-offs before an architecture is built or changed.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the agent-skills plugin — 9 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to create system designs, component diagrams, capacity estimates, database and…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/peterhdd/agent-skills/engineering-system-designer
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 PeterHdd/agent-skills --skill engineering-system-designer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PeterHdd/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 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 engineering-system-designer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/peterhdd/agent-skills/engineering-system-designer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/peterhdd/agent-skills/engineering-system-designer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/peterhdd/agent-skills/engineering-system-designer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/peterhdd/agent-skills/engineering-system-designer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,773 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 $0.00072 $0.02773
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.01386
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00555
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00277

Measured 6d ago against content hash 1281b0850c1e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering-system-designer 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 6d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/capacity_calculator.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/engineering-system-designer/SKILL.md · 135 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 135 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

System Design Guide

Overview

This guide covers the process of turning product requirements into deployable, observable, and resilient distributed system architectures. Use it for greenfield architecture, scaling existing systems, design reviews, architecture decision records, or monolith-to-services migrations.

Design Process

1. Requirements

Clarify functional needs, non-functional targets (latency, throughput, durability), read/write ratio, peak traffic patterns, and geographic distribution. If the stakeholder cannot provide traffic numbers, estimate from user count: assume 10% DAU/MAU ratio, 5 requests per session, 80% of traffic in 8 hours (peak = 3x average).

2. Capacity estimation

Calculate QPS, storage growth, and bandwidth. Project at 1x, 5x, and 10x load. Identify the bottleneck resource. Use scripts/capacity_calculator.py for calculations. Always show your math — never state capacity without derivation.

3. High-level architecture

Map components, data stores, queues, caches, and external dependencies. Define sync vs async boundaries. Start with the fewest components possible — if 3 boxes solve it, do not draw 7.

4. Component deep-dive

Specify technology choices with justification. Define partitioning, replication, consistency model, and cache invalidation per store. Every technology choice must answer: "Why this over the simpler alternative?"

5. Data model and API design

Design schemas for primary access patterns. Define API contracts with error codes and rate limits. Plan migration strategy. Every table must have its top 3 query patterns listed with expected latency.

6. Failure modes

List every component failure and its blast radius. Define circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, and fallbacks. For each failure mode, state: what breaks, who is affected, how it is detected, and what the automatic recovery is.

7. Monitoring

Specify metrics, alerts, and dashboards required before launch. Every SLO must have a corresponding alert. Every alert must have a runbook link.

Read the full file on GitHub · 135 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 6d ago First seen · 135 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 1281b0850c1e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering-system-designer is a skill published in the GitHub repository PeterHdd/agent-skills (11 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 2,773 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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