Architecture & Systems

Architecture & Systems skills for your AI agent.

Six skills for decisions that are expensive to reverse — where the boundaries go, what the data does under concurrency, what happens when a dependency degrades. Clean Architecture enforces the Dependency Rule so business logic survives a framework change. Domain-Driven Design finds the bounded contexts the business actually has. System Design sizes a system that doesn’t exist yet with back-of-the-envelope math. Data-Intensive Apps supplies the internals — isolation levels, replication lag, partitioning. Release It! covers the hostile half of a system’s life. High Perf Browser covers the last hop, from your server to a painted pixel.

An agent without these will happily propose a three-tier diagram and a database it has heard of. With them it names the failure mode it’s accepting when it picks a consistency model, tells you the partition key will hot-spot, puts a timeout on every outbound call because a call without one is an outage waiting for a slow afternoon, and says when layering would cost more than the complexity it removes.

6 skills Updated Free & MIT-licensed

Which architecture skill do I need?

Route by what breaks, and when. Nothing exists yet and you need a defensible answer to “will this hold ten thousand requests a second?” → System Design, for the four-step method and real QPS, storage and bandwidth numbers instead of another box diagram. You can’t run a single business rule in a test without booting the web framework and a database → Clean Architecture. Your team and your code use different words for the same thing, and one Customer class has grown forty fields because three departments each needed some → Domain-Driven Design. Two users bought the last item in stock and the code looked correct → Data-Intensive Apps, which explains why the default isolation level allowed it and what a replica will serve a user who just wrote. It’s live and one slow third-party call ties up every thread → Release It!, for timeouts, circuit breakers and bulkheads. The servers are fine and the page still paints late → High Perf Browser, which counts the round trips nobody profiles.

Domain-Driven Design and Clean Architecture compound: one finds where the boundaries belong, the other decides which way dependencies cross them. Release It! is the one people install a week too late — after the first outage rather than before, when every fix is a change to code you’re now afraid of.

All 6 Architecture & Systems skills

Clean Architecture

Clean Architecture — Robert C. Martin

Clean Architecture is a free AI agent skill built on Robert C. Martin’s book. It enforces the Dependency Rule — source code dependencies point inward, from frameworks toward use cases toward entities — so your agent puts business logic where the database, the web framework and the vendor SDK can be swapped without touching it.

  • The Dependency Rule
  • Entities & Use Cases
  • Interface Adapters

Try “Restructure this application to follow Clean Architecture layers using clean-architecture skill”

Domain-Driven Design

Domain-Driven Design — Eric Evans

The Domain-Driven Design skill packages Eric Evans’s book as a free set of instructions your AI coding agent loads on demand. It makes the agent model the business first — build a ubiquitous language, split the system into bounded contexts, design aggregates that own their invariants — so the code names and enforces what the domain actually means.

  • Ubiquitous Language
  • Bounded Contexts
  • Aggregates

Try “Define bounded contexts and a context map for our e-commerce platform using domain-driven-design skill”

Data-Intensive Apps

Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann

Data-Intensive Apps carries Martin Kleppmann’s Designing Data-Intensive Applications into your AI coding agent as a free, loadable skill. It supplies the internals behind storage engines, replication, partitioning and isolation levels, so when the agent proposes a database, a sharding key or a consistency model it can name the failure mode it is accepting.

  • Storage Engines
  • Replication & Partitioning
  • Consistency & Consensus

Try “Recommend a storage engine and replication strategy for our write-heavy workload using ddia-systems skill”

System Design

System Design Interview — Alex Xu

System Design turns Alex Xu’s System Design Interview into a free skill your AI coding agent can load mid-conversation. It runs the four-step method — scope the requirements, sketch a high-level design, deep-dive the risky component, state the trade-offs — with back-of-the-envelope QPS and storage math behind every number.

  • Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation
  • Rate Limiting & Load Balancing
  • Cache & CDN Design

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

Release It!

Release It! — Michael T. Nygard

Release It! is a free, MIT-licensed AI agent skill drawn from Michael Nygard’s book on production stability. It makes your agent design for the hostile half of a system’s life: timeouts on every outbound call, circuit breakers and bulkheads at integration points, and the anti-patterns that turn one slow dependency into an outage.

  • Circuit Breakers
  • Bulkheads
  • Timeouts & Retries

Try “Add circuit breakers and bulkheads to our microservice communication layer using release-it skill”

High Perf Browser

High Performance Browser Networking — Ilya Grigorik

High Perf Browser packages Ilya Grigorik’s High Performance Browser Networking as an AI agent skill. It teaches your agent what actually costs time between a click and a painted pixel — DNS, TCP and TLS round trips, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 behaviour, connection reuse, and the critical rendering path — and how to shorten it.

  • TCP & TLS Optimization
  • HTTP/2 & HTTP/3
  • Resource Loading

Try “Optimize the critical rendering path and resource loading for our landing page using high-perf-browser skill”

npx skills add wondelai/skills --all --global

This skill is compatible with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and other agentskills.io-compatible agents.

Frequently asked questions

Do System Design and Data-Intensive Apps cover the same ground?

They sit at different altitudes and are often installed together. System Design works at the level of boxes and numbers: which components, how many, how much traffic each absorbs, what the trade-off is. Data-Intensive Apps works inside the boxes — how a storage engine writes, what replication lag does to a read, why one isolation level permits a lost update. Use System Design to shape a proposal, Data-Intensive Apps to know what you just agreed to.

Do I need any of this for a straightforward CRUD app?

Probably less than you think, and Domain-Driven Design is the one to skip. Its own guidance says a genuinely simple domain makes the modelling ceremony rather than clarity. Clean Architecture also costs more than it returns on a small app. What still earns its place early is Release It! — every app calls something over a network, and timeouts and sensible failure behavior are cheap before launch and painful afterwards.

Why is High Perf Browser in the architecture category rather than design?

Because the decisions it governs are infrastructural, not visual. It’s about DNS, TCP and TLS round trips, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 behavior, connection reuse and what actually blocks the critical rendering path — protocol-level choices that get baked into how you serve and cache. The visual side of perceived speed, like skeleton states and layout stability, belongs to Refactoring UI and Web Typography instead.

How does this compare to the Design Code Architecture journey?

The journey is for a new system, and sequences these skills in an order that stops later decisions being foreclosed by earlier ones — model, then boundaries, then capacity, then failure behavior. This category is for a system that exists and has a specific symptom: a hot shard, a thread pool exhausted by one slow vendor, a class nobody can place in a layer. One framework, aimed at the thing that’s hurting.

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