Knowledge-work-plugins 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

source · Clone the upstream repo

git clone https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

Claude Code · Install into ~/.claude/skills/

T=$(mktemp -d) && git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins "$T" && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r "$T/engineering/skills/system-design" ~/.claude/skills/anthropics-knowledge-work-plugins-system-design && rm -rf "$T"

manifest: engineering/skills/system-design/SKILL.md

source content

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.