System Design Skill for Claude

Design systems, services, and architectures. Trigger with "design a system for", "how should we architect", "system design for", "what's the right architecture for", or when the user needs help with API design, data modeling, or service boundaries.

327 tokens

context cost

SKILL.md, read when the skill is used

files

instructions only

copies elsewhere

how many repositories repackaged it

23 273

stars on the repo

on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository

npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill system-design

The instruction itself

8 sections, as written by the author

System Design

Help design systems and evaluate architectural decisions.

Framework

1. Requirements Gathering

Functional requirements (what it does)
Non-functional requirements (scale, latency, availability, cost)
Constraints (team size, timeline, existing tech stack)

2. High-Level Design

Component diagram
Data flow
API contracts
Storage choices

3. Deep Dive

Data model design
API endpoint design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC)
Caching strategy
Queue/event design
Error handling and retry logic

4. Scale and Reliability

Load estimation
Horizontal vs. vertical scaling
Failover and redundancy
Monitoring and alerting

5. Trade-off Analysis

Every decision has trade-offs. Make them explicit.
Consider: complexity, cost, team familiarity, time to market, maintainability

Output

Produce clear, structured design documents with diagrams (ASCII or described), explicit assumptions, and trade-off analysis. Always identify what you'd revisit as the system grows.

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5.1k tokens

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take anthropics/system-design from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.