Free review resource
Claude system design checklist.
Use this checklist before shipping a Claude workflow, agent, or MCP integration. It turns broad architecture advice into concrete review questions about authority, evidence, failure, and control.
This is independent preparation material. Verify product-specific behaviour against the linked Anthropic sources before making production decisions.
1. Goal and decision
- Can you state the user outcome in one sentence?
- Which decision needs model judgment, and which steps can stay deterministic?
- What evidence will show that the outcome is correct—not merely plausible?
2. Context and state
- Which facts must be current, and which source is authoritative for each one?
- Is untrusted content clearly separated from system instructions and tool authority?
- What should be retrieved just in time, summarised, cached, or stored durably?
3. Tools and side effects
- Does every tool have one clear purpose and a validated input contract?
- Are read-only operations separated from external or irreversible actions?
- Can duplicate calls, timeouts, partial completion, and malformed responses recover safely?
4. Authority and safety
- What is the least permission each step needs?
- Which actions require a human approval, and is the target and effect visible before execution?
- What happens when an instruction, source, or tool result is suspicious, stale, or contradictory?
5. Limits and evaluation
- Are time, token, tool-call, and cost budgets bounded?
- Does the workflow have a clear stop condition and escalation path?
- Do evaluations test the full trajectory: tool selection, state change, safety, recovery, and final outcome?
Study the reasoning behind it
A checklist catches omissions; the guides explain the decision patterns. Use the relevant guide when a review question reveals an uncertain boundary.
Practise the decisions, not the vocabulary.
Use scenario questions to test whether you can choose a safe architecture when the trade-offs are less obvious.
Explore practice questions →