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# Skill: System Design (Cross-Cutting)
## Purpose
Evaluate architectural decisions, design API endpoints, model data schemas, and analyze trade-offs.
## When to Use
- When architecting a new microservice, system, or database model
- When defining API boundaries and integration contracts between components
- When scaling system capacities and outlining horizontal/vertical tradeoffs
## Step-by-Step Process
### Step 1: Gather Requirements & Constraints
- List functional requirements (what the system must do)
- List non-functional requirements (throughput, scale, latency, availability)
- Identify technical constraints (team skill set, budget, timeline, existing stack)
### Step 2: High-Level Design
- Map out system components (services, clients, data stores)
- Outline data flow and request/response lifecycles
- Choose datastores (SQL, NoSQL, Cache, Document store)
### Step 3: Deep Dive & Contract Design
- Define database schema models and indexing strategies
- Design concrete API contracts (REST endpoints, GraphQL query structures, gRPC specs)
- Design error-handling patterns, caching strategies, and event queue definitions
### Step 4: Trade-off Analysis
- Document choices explicitly using architectural trade-offs (e.g. Read latency vs Write latency)
- Formulate scaling strategies (sharding, replication, failover mechanisms)
## Required Input
- Architecture goals, specifications, or user stories
- Expected load (requests per second, data size)
- Pre-existing tech stack constraints
## Expected Output
- System design document containing:
- Architecture diagram (ASCII or Mermaid)
- Data model and DB schema
- API endpoint specifications
- Cache/Queue strategy
- Explicit trade-off analysis
## Tone & Rules
- Every design decision must have a corresponding trade-off analyzed.
- Keep designs modular and explain service boundaries clearly.
- Avoid over-engineering. Design for 10x scale, but build for 1.5x scale.
## Available Templates
- None
## Available Scripts
- None
## Examples
See `examples/` directory.
## Links to Other Skills
- **documents**: Use to generate product and technical specification documents.
- **suggestion**: Use to analyze existing systems and suggest architectural improvements.
