system-design-document

system-design-document is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from The-AI-Directory-Company/agents-and-skills. It costs 32 tokens per session (1,355 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A detailed document for explaining how a software system or feature should be designed. It can describe the architecture, components, API contracts, failure cases, and Architecture Decision Records, which record important design choices and their reasons.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing a new system, major refactor, or service and when documenting decisions about scale, reliability, data retention, or compliance.
Why use it?
It gives engineers and reviewers a shared view of the design, constraints, expected behavior, and ways the system may fail.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it when designing a new system, major refactor, or service and when documenting decisions about scale, reliability, data retention, or compliance.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/the-ai-directory-company/agents-and-skills/system-design-document
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 The-AI-Directory-Company/agents-and-skills --skill system-design-document
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/The-AI-Directory-Company/agents-and-skills

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-document

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-ai-directory-company/agents-and-skills/system-design-document/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-ai-directory-company/agents-and-skills/system-design-document)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-ai-directory-company/agents-and-skills/system-design-document"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-ai-directory-company/agents-and-skills/system-design-document/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 system-design-document

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-ai-directory-company/agents-and-skills/system-design-document"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-ai-directory-company/agents-and-skills/system-design-document.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,355 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 $0.00032 $0.01355
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00678
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00271
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00136

Measured 8d ago against content hash 14ec843e766c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

system-design-document 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/system-design-document/SKILL.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

System Design Document

Before you start

Gather the following information. If any is missing, ask the user before proceeding:

  1. Problem context — What system or feature is being designed? Link to the PRD if one exists.
  2. Non-functional requirements — Expected load, latency targets, uptime SLA, data retention, compliance needs.
  3. Constraints — Existing tech stack, team expertise, budget, timeline, vendor commitments.
  4. Stakeholders — Who reviews this? (e.g., staff engineer, SRE lead, security team)
  5. Scope boundary — Is this a new system, a major refactor, or an extension of an existing service?

If the user only gives you a vague ask ("design a notification system"), push back: ask about scale (how many notifications/day?), delivery guarantees (at-least-once? exactly-once?), and latency requirements.

System design template

Use the following template. Every section is required unless explicitly marked optional.


Title

[System Name] — System Design Document

1. Context & Motivation (3-5 sentences)

Why does this system need to exist? Reference the PRD or business driver. State what currently exists (if anything) and why it is insufficient.

2. Goals & Non-Goals

Goals — 3-5 specific outcomes this design achieves. Each must be verifiable.

Non-goals — Things this design explicitly does NOT address. This prevents scope creep during review.

3. Non-Functional Requirements

Requirement Target Rationale
Availability 99.9% (8.7h downtime/year) Customer SLA
P99 latency < 200ms User-facing endpoint
Throughput 5,000 req/s peak Black Friday projection
Data retention 90 days hot, 2 years cold Compliance requirement

4. Architecture Overview

Provide a high-level diagram (Mermaid or ASCII). Show major components, data flow direction, and external dependencies. Label sync vs. async communication. Every box must appear in Section 5.

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 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. 8d ago First seen · 130 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 14ec843e766c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

system-design-document is a skill published in the GitHub repository The-AI-Directory-Company/agents-and-skills (2 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 1,355 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 2026-09-03.

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