About

What Clairvoyance is

Clairvoyance is a free, open-source collection of software design skills for AI coding agents. AI agents have become exceptional collaborators for writing working code, but they don't stop to consider design unless asked. Each skill in Clairvoyance attempts to give your agent "extrasensory perspective" to design better software and provides concrete tests it can apply during implementation and review to avoid obstacles before it runs into them.

Where the ideas come from

The skills are inspired by John Ousterhout's book A Philosophy of Software Design, which itself grew out of his years of building systems and teaching software design at Stanford. Clairvoyance recasts those principles for agentic development, turning them into guidance an AI coding agent can act on while it reads and writes real code. Every skill was written by a human with the aim of creating actually valuable guidance and not AI summarized slop.

How it works

The skills are organized into five pillars: Structure, Abstraction, Clarity, Process and Diagnostic. Your AI agent can proactively apply them automatically when they're relevant or you can invoke them directly as needed. Every skill is a Markdown file that runs inside your agent's own session and collects no data. Agents that can't install skills can connect to the same skills through Clairvoyance's read-only MCP server instead (see the privacy policy for what it receives).

Browse the full catalog on the skills page, or give an agent everything at once with llms-full.txt.

Where it can be used

Clairvoyance can be installed for use with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Antigravity, Factory Droid, GitHub Copilot CLI, Kimi Code, Pi or any AI or agent that supports the Agent Skills open standard. You can also install skills through skills.sh. See the installation guide for instructions on how to install for your platform.

Who makes it

Clairvoyance is created and maintained by Cody Bromley. The skills' Markdown, plugin/website source code, and issue tracking lives on GitHub. The project is released under the MIT License. To get in touch, see the contact page.