System Design Card 376 — API Design / Breakdown
Concern
APIs reveal system boundaries, product semantics, idempotency, and the shape of client interaction. A create-notification endpoint should expose enough information about delivery state and retries to support real clients.
What Breakdown means for this concern
In BASIC, the Breakdown step is where you clarify the product goal, workload shape, and non-functional requirement that will dominate the design. For API Design, that means the candidate should make this concern visible at the right moment instead of bolting it on at the end.
Design move
A good move is to split the problem before trying to solve it. Tie the concern back to the user flow, the workload, and the dominant trade-off. That keeps the design grounded and makes it easier for the interviewer to follow why a cache, queue, replica, partition, or rate limiter is actually necessary.
Common miss
The miss is staying at box level and never specifying how callers actually use the system. BASIC helps because the staged flow keeps this concern proportional to the prompt and connected to the rest of the architecture.
BASIC prompt
“When I reach the Breakdown stage, how does API Design change the architecture, the trade-offs, or the review checklist?”