Architecture & Systems

System Design

Scalable system design patterns and trade-offs

Design scalable systems using proven patterns and trade-off analysis from Alex Xu's System Design Interview. This skill equips your AI agent with back-of-the-envelope estimation, component design patterns, and architectural blueprints for common internet-scale systems.

System Design Interview by Alex Xu

System Design Interview

by Alex Xu

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Install this skill
npx skills add wondelai/skills/system-design
Key Concepts

What your agent learns

Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation

Quickly estimate QPS, storage, bandwidth, and memory needs to scope system requirements before diving into design.

Rate Limiting & Load Balancing

Design rate limiters (token bucket, sliding window) and load balancing strategies for high-availability systems.

Cache & CDN Design

Apply caching strategies (write-through, write-back, write-around) and CDN architectures for low-latency delivery.

Database Scaling

Choose between vertical and horizontal scaling, implement sharding, and design for read replicas and write masters.

Message Queues & Async Processing

Decouple components using message queues, implement pub/sub patterns, and design for eventual consistency.

About the Author

Alex Xu

Former Twitter/Apple engineer, bestselling system design author

Alex Xu is a software engineer and author who has worked at Twitter, Apple, and Oracle. His System Design Interview books have become the go-to resource for understanding large-scale distributed systems, with millions of copies sold worldwide.

View Book →
Example Prompts

Try these with the skill installed

Design a URL shortener that handles 100M daily active users using system-design skill

System design

Estimate the storage and QPS requirements for our notification system using system-design skill

Capacity planning

Design a rate limiting system for our public API using system-design skill

API design

Architect a real-time chat system with message persistence using system-design skill

Distributed systems
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Release It!
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Release It! — Michael T. Nygard
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High Performance Browser Networking — Ilya Grigorik

Install System Design

Free, open-source, and ready in 30 seconds.

npx skills add wondelai/skills/system-design
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MIT Licensed · Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Cowork & OpenClaw · No account needed

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