system-design
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.
Install / Use
npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill system-designInstalls into whichever agent you are using.
SKILL.md
Installable skill definition
Quality Score
Category
DesignSupported Platforms
Our assessment of system-design
system-design scores 81/100 on our quality scale, 138th of 196 Design skills we index.
Its SKILL.md is 1.3 KB long, well organised into 8 sections and no code examples: moderately detailed.
With 25,526 GitHub stars, it is one of the more widely adopted skills in the catalogue.
Maintenance, license and trust
- The repository was last updated 3 days ago, so system-design is actively maintained.
- It is released under the Apache-2.0 license, a permissive license that allows use, modification and commercial use with attribution.
- Its trust signals score 100/100, with no cautions. These come from repository metadata, not a code audit — read the skill file before letting an agent act on it.
Safety scan
No issues foundOur scan of the whole file found no instruction hijacking, hidden characters, credential access, data exfiltration or destructive commands.
Automated pattern scan on 2026-09-28. It catches known dangerous patterns, not every risk — read a skill before letting an agent act on it.
system-design compared with similar skills
All 4 of these similar skills score higher than system-design; compare them before choosing.
| Skill | Score | Stars | Updated | Format |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| system-design (this skill)by anthropics | 81 | 25.5k | 3d ago | SKILL.md |
| Agent-Reachby Panniantong | 100 | 85.8k | 12d ago | CLAUDE.md |
| headroomby headroomlabs-ai | 100 | 74.0k | 1d ago | CLAUDE.md |
| crawl4aiby unclecode | 100 | 84.4k | 2d ago | MCP Server |
| Scraplingby D4Vinci | 100 | 84.1k | today | MCP Server |
Frequently asked questions
- How do I install system-design?
- Run
npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill system-design. The install tabs above show the steps for each supported agent. - Which AI agents does system-design work with?
- It is written for Universal, as a SKILL.md file. Other agents that read the same format can often use it too.
- Is system-design safe to use?
- Our scan of the whole file found no instruction hijacking, hidden characters, credential access, data exfiltration or destructive commands. It is Apache-2.0-licensed and scores 100/100 on trust signals. Skills are instructions an agent will follow, so read the file before installing it and do not approve commands you do not understand.
- Is system-design still maintained?
- The repository was last updated 3 days ago, so system-design is actively maintained.
Skill content
View source on GitHubname: system-design description: 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.
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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Languages
Trust signals
From repository metadata: license, adoption, age and documentation. Not a code audit — see the Safety scan above for what the skill file itself contains.