data-pipeline-design

data-pipeline-design is a skill for Claude Code from sethdford/claude-skills. It costs 37 tokens per session (659 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing batch and streaming data pipelines. These pipelines collect data, transform it, check its quality, and deliver it to another system; batch runs on a schedule, while streaming handles data continuously.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing ETL or ELT systems, ingestion jobs, real-time data flows, quality checks, orchestration, and failure handling.
Why use it?
It helps plan reliable data movement with suitable speed, monitoring, and recovery when something fails.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the data-architecture plugin — 8 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when designing ETL or ELT systems, ingestion jobs, real-time data flows, quality checks, orchestration, and failure handling.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sethdford/claude-skills/data-pipeline-design
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 sethdford/claude-skills --skill data-pipeline-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sethdford/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install data-architecture, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 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 data-pipeline-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/data-pipeline-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/data-pipeline-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/data-pipeline-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/data-pipeline-design/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for data-pipeline-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/data-pipeline-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/data-pipeline-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 659 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 $0.00037 $0.00659
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00329
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00132
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00066

Measured 12d ago against content hash bf932f7e220c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

data-pipeline-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 12d 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.

architect/data-architecture/skills/data-pipeline-design/SKILL.md · 48 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 48 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Data Pipeline Design

Design robust, maintainable data pipelines that reliably move, transform, and validate data at scale.

Context

You are designing data pipelines (batch or streaming). Plan data flow, transformations, quality gates, failure recovery, and monitoring. Read source systems, target requirements, latency expectations, and volume projections.

Domain Context

Based on modern data engineering practices (Spark, Airflow, Kafka, Beam):

  • Batch Pipelines: Scheduled jobs (hourly, daily); high throughput, moderate latency
  • Streaming Pipelines: Continuous ingestion; low latency, higher operational complexity
  • Micro-batching: Spark Streaming; lower latency than batch, simpler than true streaming
  • Orchestration: DAG-based scheduling (Airflow, dbt) for complex multi-stage pipelines
  • Observability: Monitor latency, throughput, data quality, freshness

Instructions

  1. Choose Processing Model: Batch (daily jobs?) or streaming (realtime features?)? Hybrid (Lambda: batch + streaming for both speed and accuracy)? Consider latency SLA and cost.

  2. Design Data Stages: Raw ingestion (as-is from source) → Bronze. Cleansing and normalization → Silver. Business logic and enrichment → Gold. This layered medallion architecture separates concerns.

  3. Implement Quality Gates: Validation at each stage. Fail pipeline if data quality drops. Track anomalies: unexpected null rates, value distributions, cardinality changes.

  4. Handle Failures and Recovery: Idempotent transformations allow safe retries. Checkpoint state for streaming pipelines; resume from last checkpoint on failure. Use dead-letter queues for unparseable records.

  5. Plan Monitoring and Alerting: Track freshness (when was last successful run?), latency (time from source to sink), volume (record counts by stage), error rates. Alert on anomalies and SLA misses.

Anti-Patterns

  • No Data Quality Checks: Assume data from source is clean. Result: garbage in, garbage out. Guard: Validate at ingestion; alert on schema changes or anomalies.
  • Tightly Coupled Transformations: Pipeline is monolithic script. Result: hard to test, reuse, debug. Guard: Break into modular stages; each stage is independently testable.
  • No Checkpoint/Recovery: Assume pipelines always succeed. Result: gaps in data, lost work. Guard: Checkpoint state; design for idempotent retries.
  • Ignoring Operational Overhead: Streaming pipelines look simple at 1MB/s, collapse at 1GB/s. Result: unexpected scaling headaches. Guard: Load-test pipelines; plan infrastructure for 10x growth.

Read the full file on GitHub · 48 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. 12d ago First seen · 48 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A bf932f7e220c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

data-pipeline-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository sethdford/claude-skills (41 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 659 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.