Claude Code plugin

System design,
wired into your agent

A senior engineer's notebook your coding agent can read. One skill, ten commands, fourteen self-contained reference files — tradeoffs stated, not hand-waved.

/plugin marketplace add mkabumattar/sysdesign
The method

Design is a chain of tradeoffs,
not a stack of best practices.

Every answer follows the same three moves — the same shape as the mark.

01

State the constraint

Traffic pattern, consistency need, latency budget, team reality. No numbers? Assume out loud.

02

Pick the option

Reuse before build, managed before self-hosted, boring before novel. Name the one that fits.

03

Name the tradeoff

Every choice costs something — consistency, ops burden, latency, money. Say it plainly.

Ten commands

One skill, many intents.

Each command is a thin wrapper over the one system-design skill, so the reasoning stays consistent.

/sysdesign:explain
what it is, when to use it, the tradeoff
/sysdesign:compare
options compared, one recommended for a constraint
/sysdesign:review
pressure-test a design for SPOFs and safeguards
/sysdesign:choose
pick a DB / queue / cache / deploy under constraints
/sysdesign:estimate
back-of-envelope QPS, storage, bandwidth, memory
/sysdesign:tradeoffs
name what a choice gains and gives up
/sysdesign:diagram
sketch the architecture as Mermaid or ASCII
/sysdesign:interview
7-step framework, estimates, tradeoffs
/sysdesign:cheatsheet
condense an area into a scannable sheet
/sysdesign:help
list commands and reference topics
Fourteen reference files

The knowledge lives in the files.

Dense, original, tradeoff-first prose. No external links — a reader never has to click out.

01  api-web02  data-storage03  caching-performance04  distributed-systems05  security-auth06  devops-k8s07  architecture-patterns08  case-studies09  networking10  os-concurrency11  payments12  ai-ml-systems13  dev-tools14  interview
Why it's different

Quiet command, not coverage.

Self-contained

Zero external links inside the skill. The agent loads only the file a task needs, and the answer is right there.

Tradeoff-first

No option is named without the constraint it fits and the cost it carries. A design with no stated tradeoff isn't finished.

License-clean

Original prose, inspired by the taxonomy of System Design 101 — never copied from it. MIT.

Works offline

Plain Markdown and two JSON manifests. No build, no runtime, no network. Install and go.

The maintainer

Built by Mohammad Abu Mattar.

Cloud & DevOps Manager at Motory, with around eight years across full-stack, backend, and platform engineering. Day to day that's multi-cloud Kubernetes on AWS, Huawei Cloud, and Hetzner, infrastructure as code with Terraform, and CI/CD on Jenkins and ArgoCD.

sysdesign distills that experience into a reference an agent can read — the same tradeoff-first habit, packaged so a coding assistant reaches for the right option and names what it costs.

Install

Two prompts in Claude Code.

claude
/plugin marketplace add mkabumattar/sysdesign
/plugin install sysdesign@sysdesign

Already installed? Update with /plugin update sysdesign then /reload-plugins.

MIT · self-contained · 10 commands · 14 reference files · no telemetry