system-design

System Design — a Claude Code Skill

Ask "design a rate limiter" or "push vs pull for a celebrity feed?" and get the frameworks, trade-offs, and numbers you need — routed to the right material, on demand.

A Claude Code plugin that puts system-design interview frameworks at your fingertips while you work. The 4-step method and core mental models load instantly; deeper topics and full system walkthroughs load only when you ask.

[!IMPORTANT] Study aid, not a substitute for the book. Every concept here originates from Alex Xu's System Design Interview — An Insider's Guide (Vol. 1 & 2). If this is useful to you, buy the books and support the author: https://bytebytego.com.

Install

/plugin marketplace add vukhanhtruong/system-design-skill
/plugin install system-design@system-design-skill

Then invoke it any time with /system-design, or just ask a system-design question and the skill activates.

git clone https://github.com/vukhanhtruong/system-design-skill.git
cp -r system-design-skill/skills/system-design ~/.claude/skills/

When to reach for /system-design

Not for: production configuration. It gives interview-altitude reasoning, not exact APIs, limits, or pricing. For real builds, pair it with current vendor docs (Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka, AWS…).

Sample prompts

Browse / meta

what chapters do you have?
show me the core frameworks
what's in the cheatsheet?

Explain a topic — the skill finds and reads the right chapter

explain consistent hashing
how does fanout work?
token bucket vs leaking bucket
how do I get exactly-once delivery?
explain quorum W+R>N
saga vs TC-C vs 2PC

Design a system — full 4-step walkthrough

design a URL shortener
walk me through designing a chat system
design a Twitter news feed
design a payment system

Interview practice

run a mock interview: design a notification system
quiz me on the 4-step framework
back-of-envelope numbers for 100M DAU
what latency numbers should I memorize?

Decision / trade-off

shard or replicate for read-heavy load?
push vs pull for a feed with celebrities?
which rate-limit algorithm for bursty traffic?
CP or AP for a shopping cart?

Review your design

review my design: [paste] — what failure modes did I miss?
did I handle idempotency right in this payment flow?

What's inside

• Core frameworks (instant): 4-step method, back-of-envelope estimation, scaling spine, CAP + quorum, consistent hashing, fanout, rate limiting, money/correctness, queues & streaming.
• 28 chapter summaries (on demand): from rate limiter and KV store to payment systems, digital wallets, and a stock exchange.
• References: a glossary, a patterns file with trade-offs, and a decision cheatsheet.

Attribution & copyright

All system-design concepts and frameworks are the intellectual property of Alex Xu (Vol. 2 with Sahn Lam) and ByteByteGo. This repository contains independently written summaries and original structuring intended as a personal/educational study companion under fair-use principles. It does not include the book's text verbatim, its figures, or its diagrams.

If you are a rights holder with a concern, please open an issue or contact the maintainer — disputed content will be removed promptly.

See NOTICE for full attribution and LICENSE for the terms covering this plugin's original scaffolding and code.