About SysDesAi

I've been designing distributed systems for years — for work, interviews, side projects. The process is always the same: clarify requirements, estimate capacity, sketch the architecture, think through data models and APIs, draw sequence diagrams, figure out scaling bottlenecks. Methodical but time-consuming, and I was repeating it from scratch every single time.

I wanted one place to do all of it: refresh my architecture knowledge, keep up with how companies like Netflix and Stripe actually build things, and try out design ideas without starting from a blank page every time.

So I built SysDesAi. It started as a tool for myself — part AI architect, part learning platform, part engineering news source. You describe what you want to design and an AI walks through it with you step by step: requirements, capacity estimates, API design, data models, architecture diagrams, sequence flows, scaling bottlenecks. It's a conversation, not a one-shot generator. You can push back at every step, ask questions, or take the conversation in a different direction.

Then I realized: the best system design inspiration comes from real engineering blogs. Netflix writing about their CDN, Uber explaining their dispatch system, Stripe on payment idempotency. Reading those always made me want to sketch the architecture myself. So I added a live engineering news feed that aggregates articles from 35+ sources and turns each one into a design opportunity.

It ended up growing beyond the design tool — into a full course with quizzes and certificates, a gallery of 48+ explorable architecture walkthroughs, and a community of software architects with discussions, profiles, reputation levels, and a leaderboard.

A few friends tried it and kept pushing me to share it publicly. It's still very much a work in progress — there are probably bugs, rough edges, things that could be better. But they found it genuinely useful for staying sharp on system design, prepping for interviews, and architecting their own projects.