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.
02 Choosing
Which architecture skill do I need?
Route by what breaks, and when. Six symptoms, six answers.
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.
Find where the boundaries belong, then decide which way dependencies cross them.
03 The six skills
All six Architecture & Systems skills.
Each installs on its own, in about thirty seconds, and works in any agent that reads the open agentskills.io format.
04 Used by
Where these six
get sequenced.
Guides and guided journeys that run Architecture & Systems skills alongside the rest of the library — in the order that stops you fixing the wrong thing first.
05 Questions
Before you install.
The four we get asked most about this stack. The generic ones — pricing, licence, agents — live on the library page.
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.
Every skill installs alone. The library installs together.
Install all six, or just one.
npx skills add wondelai/skills --all --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account