System design interview prep and architecture review for Claude Code. Walks you through designing distributed systems and audits existing ones.
User: "Design a chat system"
→ Scope: clarifying questions, constraints, scale
→ High-Level Design: box diagrams, APIs, data flow
→ Deep Dive: 2-3 components, tradeoffs, alternatives
→ Wrap-Up: bottlenecks, failures, monitoring, next scale curve
User: "Review my URL shortener architecture"
→ Audit against reference design
→ Flag missing components, wrong tradeoffs, anti-patterns
→ Verdict with concrete fixes
15 distributed system designs:
| # | Design | Key Concepts |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Scale from zero to millions | LB, replication, cache, CDN, sharding, multi-DC |
| 2 | Back-of-envelope estimation | DAU-to-QPS, latency numbers, availability nines |
| 3 | System design interview framework | 4-step framework, time allocation, signals |
| 4 | Rate limiter | Token bucket, sliding window, Redis counters |
| 5 | Consistent hashing | Hash ring, virtual nodes, redistribution |
| 6 | Key-value store | CAP theorem, quorum, vector clocks, gossip protocol |
| 7 | Unique ID generator | Snowflake, UUID, ticket server, bit layout |
| 8 | URL shortener | Base 62, hash+collision, 301/302, bloom filter |
| 9 | Web crawler | BFS, URL frontier, politeness, content fingerprinting |
| 10 | Notification system | Multi-channel, message queues, retry, dedup |
| 11 | News feed | Fan-out on write vs read, celebrity problem |
| 12 | Chat system | WebSocket, presence, message sync |
| 13 | Search autocomplete | Trie, top-k, browser/CDN caching |
| 14 | YouTube | Video transcoding DAG, CDN, streaming protocols |
| 15 | Google Drive | Block-level sync, delta sync, conflict resolution |
Also includes foundational scaling concepts, design patterns, and review checklists.
| Skill | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| distributed-systems-design | 4-step system design framework with CHECKER and APPLIER modes | "design a rate limiter" / "review my chat system architecture" |
Built for expansion. More skills coming.
# Add marketplace (if not already added)
/plugin marketplace add ryanthedev/rtd-claude-inn
# Install plugin
/plugin install systems-design@rtd
# Update to latest
/plugin update systems-design@rtdCurrent version: 0.1.0
The skill displays its version at runtime by reading from .claude-plugin/plugin.json.
MIT