Skills

When to use

Activate this skill when any of the following situations, signals, or requests are detected:

• A user asks how to scale a system, service, application, or infrastructure component to handle more users, traffic, requests, or data.
• A user describes performance degradation, high latency, timeout errors, resource exhaustion, or capacity concerns in an existing system.
• A user requests a review or critique of an existing architecture for scalability readiness or bottleneck identification.
• A user is designing a new system and wants guidance on making it scalable from the start (greenfield scalability design).
• A user asks about load balancing, caching, sharding, replication, partitioning, CDN strategies, message queues, or event-driven architectures in the context of handling growth.
• A user needs to plan for anticipated traffic spikes, seasonal load patterns, viral growth, or migration from monolith to distributed architecture.
• A user asks about auto-scaling policies, cloud-native scaling, container orchestration scaling, or serverless scaling strategies.
• A user wants to understand tradeoffs (CAP theorem, consistency vs. availability, cost vs. performance, latency vs. throughput) for a system under scale.
• A user requests a scalability test plan, load testing strategy, or performance benchmarking approach.
• A user needs documentation, architecture decision records, or rationale for scalability choices made in a system design.
• A system design discussion involves any combination of: high concurrency, large datasets, real-time processing, geo-distribution, multi-tenancy, or rapid user growth.

If the request touches scalability, performance under load, distributed system design, or capacity planning in any meaningful way, activate this skill and follow the full instruction sequence below, adapting depth and scope to the specificity of the user's request.