Engineering Advanced APIRate LimitingReliability

API Rate Limiter Designer

API rate limiting design: token bucket, leaky bucket, fixed and sliding windows, quota policies, 429 behavior, and multi-tenant enforcement.

A rate-limiting design skill for teams that need fairness and protection without surprising legitimate users. It covers algorithm choice, identity scope, 429 contracts, distributed enforcement, and tuning from abuse signals and false-positive evidence.

Added Apr 12, 2026

$npx skills add johnefemer/skillfish --skill api-rate-limiter-designer

Capabilities Get Started Models & Context Works Great With

What This Skill Can Do

Concrete capabilities you get when you install this skill.

Define rate-limit scopes by IP, key, user, tenant, or endpoint cost

Choose between token bucket, leaky bucket, fixed-window, and sliding-window approaches

Design 429 contracts, headers, and retry guidance for client developers

Plan distributed enforcement, sharding, and degraded-mode behavior

Separate fairness classes for anonymous, premium, and internal traffic

Tune policies from blocked-traffic evidence and false-positive rates

Get Started

How to install and use this skill in your preferred environment.

Skills are designed for AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) and IDE-based workflows where the agent can read files, run scripts, and act on your codebase.

Models & Context

Which AI models and context windows work best with this skill.

Recommended Models

Claude Sonnet or GPT-4o recommended. Distributed fairness and degraded-mode behavior benefit from stronger reasoning.

Context Window

SKILL.md is concise (~3KB). Fits in 32K context; large API fleets and multi-tenant limit policies benefit from 64K+.

Pro tips for best results

1

Be specific

Include numbers — users, budget, RPS — so the skill can size the architecture.

2

Share constraints

Compliance needs, team size, and existing stack all improve the output.

3

Iterate

Start with a high-level design, then ask follow-ups for IaC, cost analysis, or security review.

4

Combine skills

Pair with companion skills below for end-to-end coverage.

Works Great With

These skills complement API Rate Limiter Designer for end-to-end coverage. Install them together for better results.

API Design Reviewer

REST API linter, breaking change detector, and design scorecard.

APIReview

Senior Backend

REST APIs, database optimization, authentication, and microservices.

BackendAPIs

Network Engineer

Network engineering: VPC/VNet design, routing, DNS, load balancers, firewalls, segmentation, troubleshooting, and traffic change planning.

NetworkingInfrastructure

Observability Designer

SLO design, alert optimization, and dashboard generation.

ObservabilitySLO

$ skillfish add johnefemer/skillfish --all # install all skills at once

Ready to try API Rate Limiter Designer?

Install the skill and start getting expert-level guidance in your workflow — any agent, any IDE.