Download and import the RFC & System Design Critic JSON
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RFC & System Design Critic Prompt: uncover scaling bottlenecks and dual-write bugs.
Download the RFC & System Design Critic JSON preset for Vezz me. Highlight engineering design docs, ADRs, or protocol specs to uncover scaling bottlenecks and single points of failure.
Best fit
Best for Staff/Principal engineers, tech leads, SREs, and candidates preparing for distributed systems design reviews.
On-screen walkthrough
How this looks on a real webpage.
Instead of switching tabs and rebuilding context, highlight the exact passage that slowed you down and press your shortcut (default: Ctrl+Shift+X or Cmd+Shift+X on macOS, fully customizable in settings).
1. Highlighted on page (Internal Engineering RFC — Subscription Tier Upgrade Flow)
When a user upgrades their subscription plan, the Billing Service commits the new plan tier to PostgreSQL and immediately publishes a PlanUpdated event to Kafka and invalidates the user's Redis permissions cache key. If the Kafka publish fails, the HTTP handler returns a 500 error so the frontend can retry the upgrade.
Ctrl+Shift+X“Stress-test this system design for partial failures, dual writes, and scaling bottlenecks.”
2. Vezz me on-screen answer overlay
1. **Dual-Write Inconsistency Bug**: Committing to Postgres and *then* publishing to Kafka inside the request handler is not atomic. If Postgres commits and Kafka times out (or the pod crashes in between), the DB is upgraded, downstream Kafka consumers never learn about it, and returning `500` causes the client to retry.
2. **Cache Race Condition**: Deleting the Redis key can race with a concurrent read repopulating Redis from a lagging read replica.
3. **Constructive Fixes**:
- Use the **Transactional Outbox Pattern** (write `subscriptions` + `outbox_events` in the same Postgres ACID transaction).
- Require an `Idempotency-Key` header on the upgrade endpoint.
3. Suggested follow-up questions in thread
- “How should we handle Redis cache invalidation from the Outbox relay worker?”
- “Write a polite, constructive RFC comment summarizing this dual-write issue.”
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Vezz me Custom Prompt Preset
RFC & System Design Critic
Systematically probes the 3 areas authors forget when writing happy-path design docs: partial downstream brownouts, dual-write atomicity, and rollback compatibility.
Act as a constructive Staff Distributed Systems Engineer reviewing the selected RFC or system design proposal: 1) Failure Mode & Partial Outage Audit: what happens when a downstream dependency slows down 10x or drops 50% of requests? Flag any dual-write inconsistency, thundering herd, or unbounded queue growth, 2) Scaling & Cardinality Bottleneck: which component, lock, or index hits a wall first at 10x–100x volume?, 3) Day-2 Operations & Rollback Gap: is the schema/wire change backward-compatible for zero-downtime rollback?, and 4) Constructive Fixes: suggest 2 concrete architectural improvements.Step-by-step workflow
How to run this workflow in place.
Highlight the data-flow or state-transition section of an RFC
Select the proposed architecture section in Notion, Google Docs, Confluence, or GitHub.
Address the dual-write, backpressure, and rollback findings
Use the critique to harden your own proposal before review—or leave high-signal feedback on a teammate's doc.
Key details
Why this approach works better than switching tabs.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about architecture review preset.
Can I also use this preset when studying for System Design interviews?
Yes! Highlighting solutions in system design blogs or books and running this preset shows you the deep follow-up questions interviewers ask at Senior/Staff levels.
Does it work on IETF RFCs and public protocol specs?
Yes—see our workflow guide on reading IETF RFCs and W3C specifications.
Is my internal RFC private when using Vezz me?
Vezz me uses activeTab only—it never runs background scripts on your Google Docs or Notion workspace and only processes the specific passage you highlight and send.
Related workflows & guides
Explore connected pages.
Ready to try this workflow on your own reading?
Install Vezz me free, highlight text on any webpage, and press your customizable shortcut (default: Ctrl+Shift+X or Cmd+Shift+X on Mac) to get an answer right beside the source.
