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.
$ npx promptcreek add system-designAuto-detects your installed agents and installs the skill to each one.
What This Skill Does
This skill assists in designing systems and evaluating architectural decisions. It guides users through requirements gathering, high-level design, deep dives into specific components, and considerations for scale and reliability. It's useful for software architects and senior engineers.
When to Use
- Design a new software system.
- Evaluate architectural trade-offs.
- Create system design documents.
- Plan for scaling and reliability.
- Model data flow and API contracts.
- Choose appropriate storage solutions.
Key Features
Installation
$ npx promptcreek add system-designAuto-detects your installed agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.) and installs the skill to each one.
View Full Skill 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.
Supported Agents
Attribution
Details
- License
- MIT
- Source
- admin
- Published
- 3/18/2026
Tags
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