Structures system-design answers with requirements, capacity estimates, architecture, trade-offs, and component deep dives.
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name: system-design-interview
description: "Structure a complete system design answer for interview questions or real architecture sessions. Use when asked to design a system, answer a system design interview question, or architect a solution at scale. Produces a structured answer covering requirements, capacity estimates, high-level design, component deep-dives, trade-offs, and follow-up considerations."
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# System Design Interview Skill
Structures a complete, interview-grade system design response — covering clarifying questions, requirements, capacity estimates, architecture, component design, and trade-offs. Works equally well for real architecture sessions.
## Required Inputs
Ask for these if not provided:
- **The system to design** (e.g. "design a URL shortener", "design a notification service", "design Twitter's feed")
- **Scope** (interview prep / real architecture decision / practice run)
- **Scale target** (rough numbers: DAU, requests/sec, data volume — or "assume typical web scale")
- **Constraints or priorities** (e.g. prioritise availability over consistency, minimise cost, low-latency reads)
- **Time available** (interview context only: 30 / 45 / 60 minutes — skip for real architecture sessions)
- **Emphasis** (optional — any area to go deeper on, e.g. "focus on the DB design" or "spend more time on scaling")
## Output Format
### 1. Clarifying Questions
Before designing, list 4–6 questions that would change the design. Examples:
- Read-heavy or write-heavy? (affects caching and DB choice)
- Global or single-region? (affects latency requirements)… load the full skill through Skill Me