system-design
anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins
Design systems, services, and architectures with structured frameworks and trade-off analysis.
What is system-design?
This skill helps you design systems and evaluate architectural decisions using a systematic framework. Use it when you need to architect services, design APIs, model data, or define service boundaries.
- Gather functional and non-functional requirements (scale, latency, availability, cost)
- Create high-level design with component diagrams, data flow, and API contracts
- Design data models, API endpoints (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), and caching strategies
- Estimate load, plan horizontal/vertical scaling, and design failover mechanisms
- Analyze trade-offs explicitly across complexity, cost, team familiarity, and maintainability
How to install system-design
npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill system-designHow to use system-design
- 1.Describe your functional requirements (what the system does)
- 2.Specify non-functional requirements (scale targets, latency, availability, cost constraints)
- 3.List constraints (team size, timeline, existing tech stack)
- 4.Request a high-level design with component diagram and data flow
- 5.Ask for deep dives on specific areas (data model, API design, caching, queues)
- 6.Review trade-off analysis for each decision
- 7.Identify assumptions and areas to revisit as the system grows
Use cases
- Designing a new microservice architecture for a growing application
- Planning API contracts and data models before implementation
- Evaluating whether to scale horizontally or vertically for a service
- Architecting event-driven systems with queues and async processing
- Designing resilience patterns including failover, redundancy, and monitoring
- Backend engineers and architects
- Full-stack developers planning system structure
- Technical leads evaluating architectural decisions
- Teams designing new services or refactoring existing systems
system-design FAQ
Clear, structured design documents with ASCII diagrams or descriptions, explicit assumptions, and trade-off analysis for each architectural decision.
No, this skill focuses on architectural design and planning. It produces design documents and guidance to inform implementation.
Yes. Describe your current architecture, constraints, and pain points, and it can help evaluate redesign options and trade-offs.
The skill starts with requirements gathering. Share what you know and it will help you identify gaps and clarify functional and non-functional needs.
Full instructions (SKILL.md)
Source of truth, from anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins.
name: 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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