An agent is a model plus a harness — and on anything longer than a few turns, the harness (what enters context, what verifies, when it stops, what persists) moves the outcome more than prompt wording. Design the harness deliberately, keep it as small as the task allows, and write the design note before any code encodes the guesses.
Designing Agent Systems is a community-contributed Claude Code skill in the ai-tooling sub-category. It ships as a SKILL.md file that Claude Code auto-discovers under ~/.claude/skills/designing-agent-systems/ and loads when your prompt matches the skill's trigger.
When to invoke it: Use when the user says "should I use an agent", "one agent or many", or "orchestrator", or when agent code is about to be written with no design note. Harness-neutral doctrine — load it early, before code and before plans.
The Designing Agent Systems Claude Code skill is built for Claude Code users and developers across all disciplines looking for general-purpose AI assistance. It's part of ClaudSkills (also referred to as Claude Skills or Claude Code Skills) — the open community-curated registry of 206,000+ SKILL.md files for Anthropic's Claude Code agent and the wider Claude ecosystem (Claude API, Claude Agent SDK).
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/designing-agent-systems curl -L https://claudskills.com/skills/designing-agent-systems/SKILL.md \ -o ~/.claude/skills/designing-agent-systems/SKILL.md
Or just download SKILL.md directly and drop it into ~/.claude/skills/designing-agent-systems/. Claude Code auto-discovers it on next session.
Skills live at ~/.claude/skills/designing-agent-systems/SKILL.md on macOS/Linux, or %USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\designing-agent-systems\SKILL.md on Windows. See the full install guide for step-by-step instructions.
Open @claudskills_bot on Telegram, tap Open Desktop App, and the desktop app installs this skill for you. Or share the bot link with a colleague — they get the same one-tap install. Learn more →
The ClaudSkills desktop app installs any skill directly into ~/.claude/skills/ with one click — no terminal required. Pro starts at $9/mo or $149 lifetime.
For the full experience including quality scoring and one-click install features for each skill — upgrade to Pro.
SKILL.md from the source repository to ~/.claude/skills/designing-agent-systems/SKILL.md and restart Claude Code. Both flows are detailed at claudskills.com/install/.SKILL.md file that lives under ~/.claude/skills/<name>/ and tells the Claude Code CLI agent how to perform a specific task (instructions, prompts, allowed tools). Skills are auto-discovered at session start. Designing Agent Systems is one of 67,000+ skills indexed in the open ClaudSkills catalog, classified under the General category. Learn more at /learn/what-is-a-claude-skill/.If you reference this skill in a blog post, paper, or documentation, you can cite it as:
@misc{designing-agent-systems-2026,
author = {j-loyd},
title = {Designing Agent Systems [Claude Code skill]},
year = {2026},
publisher = {ClaudSkills},
url = {https://claudskills.com/skills/designing-agent-systems/}
}Grade A · scanned 2026-10-11 — free static scan against the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10.
No risk patterns were found in any of the ten OWASP-aligned categories. How grading works ›
Browse all General skills in the ClaudSkills registry, or explore these other picks from the same category:
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SKILL.md files, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.