scaling-evolution

scaling-evolution is a skill for Claude Code from proyecto26/system-design-skills. It costs 147 tokens per session (2,617 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for deciding how a system should grow as its workload increases. It explains which bottleneck to address next, from a single server to larger or distributed designs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan growth, identify what will break first, compare scaling options, and choose the next two or three infrastructure changes.
Why use it?
It helps avoid both overbuilding too early and failing to plan for the next capacity limit. The advice ties architecture changes to actual demand.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the system-design-skills plugin — 22 skills, 1 command, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it to plan growth, identify what will break first, compare scaling options, and choose the next two or three infrastructure changes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/proyecto26/system-design-skills/scaling-evolution
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 proyecto26/system-design-skills --skill scaling-evolution
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/proyecto26/system-design-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install system-design-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 1 command, 1 agent.

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 scaling-evolution

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/proyecto26/system-design-skills/scaling-evolution.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/proyecto26/system-design-skills/scaling-evolution)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/proyecto26/system-design-skills/scaling-evolution"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/proyecto26/system-design-skills/scaling-evolution.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 147 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,617 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 $0.00147 $0.02617
Opus 5 $0.00073 $0.01308
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00523
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00262

Measured 8d ago against content hash 892ad181e375, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

scaling-evolution 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 8d 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/scaling-evolution/SKILL.md · 169 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 169 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Scaling Evolution

Grow a design one bottleneck at a time. A system that serves 1k users and one that serves 10M users are different architectures, but you do not jump between them — you walk a path where each step removes the current ceiling and exposes the next. Getting this wrong means either over-building day one (paying multi- region complexity for 1k users) or freezing when load doubles because the design was a memorized end-state, not a sequence of justified moves (GUIDE #7).

When to reach for this

A load increase is on the table ("what if traffic 10×?", "scale to millions"), the user asks where the bottleneck is or what breaks first, or a single-box design has outgrown one machine. Reach here to sequence the next two or three moves — never the whole roadmap at once.

When NOT to

Do not pre-build steps the numbers do not yet demand (YAGNI). Sharding, multi-region, and a message queue are late moves; proposing them for a system that fits on two boxes is the over-indexing this skill defends against. If the current load fits comfortably on a vertically-scaled box with a replica, stop — that is the cheapest design that meets the constraint, and it wins. Naming the next five tiers when only one is needed is a red flag, not foresight.

Clarify first

The path is driven entirely by numbers and constraints, so pin these down before moving (most come from requirements-scoping and back-of-the-envelope):

  • Current and target scale — today's QPS/data and the multiple you must hit (2×? 100×?). The multiple decides how many steps you take now.
  • Read:write ratio — read-heavy systems scale with replicas + cache; write- heavy systems hit the master/storage ceiling and need sharding far sooner.
  • Where it hurts now — is the symptom compute (CPU saturated), storage (DB/disk saturated), or network (bandwidth/connections)? Diagnose before adding.
  • Consistency and staleness budget — replicas and multi-region trade freshness for scale; if reads must be current, that constrains the path (→ consistency-coordination).
  • State — is anything pinned to a server (sessions, local files)? Stateful tiers block horizontal scaling.

Read the full file on GitHub · 169 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. 8d ago First seen · 169 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A 892ad181e375

Subscribe to this mod's changes

scaling-evolution is a skill published in the GitHub repository proyecto26/system-design-skills (69 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 2,617 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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