Individual skill

factor-of-safety-failure-margin

Use this skill when planning capacity, redundancy, graceful degradation, or recovery for systems that must keep working under stress — performance budgets, dependency failure handling, retry logic, error budgets, infrastructure capacity. Trigger when scoping infrastructure, designing error-handling architecture, planning for failure modes, or reviewing reliability incidents. Sub-aspect of `factor-of-safety`; read that first.

plugins/HDeibler/universal-design-principles/plugins/process-and-robustness-principles/skills/factor-of-safety-failure-margin/SKILL.md

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# Failure margin: capacity, dependency, and graceful degradation

The complement to content-stress safety: designing the system itself to absorb failures and load spikes without falling over. The discipline is anticipating which way the system might fail and building in margin or fallback.

## Capacity margin

A system designed to handle exactly its current peak load will fail when load grows. Sustainable systems run at meaningful headroom.

### Sizing rule of thumb

- **Steady-state load**: design capacity at 2–3x typical load.
- **Anticipated peak**: design at 3–5x typical (covers daily/weekly spikes).
- **Burst capacity**: have ability to scale to 5–10x for marketing, viral events.