PAAD — Engineering-driven AI, not AI-driven engineering

PAAD (rhymes with "pad") is a set of skills for AI coding assistants. It reviews what the AI is about to work on — the spec, the plan, the architecture, the code — while you can still change it. That's Pushback, Alignment, Architecture, plus the Discipline to actually run them.

A full explanation/tutorial is here.

Quick start

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Ovid/paad

And then:

/plugin install paad@paad

Pick a scope when the details panel opens, then /reload-plugins. Run /paad-help to see everything.

Not using Claude Code? One command installs PAAD into 70+ other agents — Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Cline, Zed, Warp, Amp, OpenCode:

npx skills@latest add Ovid/paad

See Installation for the details, including the experimental Pi package.

The skills

Skill	What it does
/pushback [document]	Argues with your spec before anyone builds it
/alignment [files...]	Checks that the plan and the spec say the same thing
/agentic-review [base-branch] [path]	Six specialists review your branch before merge
/agentic-architecture [path...]	Five specialists find structural debt while it's cheap
/fix-architecture [report]	Works through those findings one at a time, test-first
/agentic-a11y [path]	Accessibility audit against WCAG 2.2 AA, by disability category
/vibe [task]	Small fixes, TDD guardrails still on
/makefile	Creates or updates a project Makefile
/paad-help [skill-name]	Lists the skills, or explains one

Experimental skills

Skill	What it does
/agentic-dedup [scope]	Finds duplicated meaning, not duplicated text — experimental
/agentic-owasp [scope]	Reviews code against the OWASP Top 10:2025 — experimental
/rethink [topic]	Checks whether the premises under a recommendation hold — experimental
/test-roadmap	Builds a test suite that catches real regressions — experimental
/handoff [save|resume]	Hands this session's work to a fresh one, in writing — experimental

Every skill can also be steered per project: drop instructions in paad/config/paad.md (all skills) or paad/config/<skill-name>.md (one skill) and the skill reads them on invocation. Experimental — see CONFIG.md.

Full descriptions are further down. The rest of this page is why any of it is worth your tokens.

"AI slop" is technical debt with better marketing

We have been accumulating technical debt since long before AI showed up, and we already know how to handle it: review the requirements, review the plan, review the architecture, review the code. Every one of those is an old, boring, well-understood engineering skill.

What AI changed is not the nature of the debt. It's the speed it arrives at.

• Vibe coding piles up debt fast.
• Spec-driven development piles it up slowly.
• Neither piles up zero.

That's the problem and it isn't new. It's just faster than the review habits most teams have, so the debt lands before anyone looks at it.

The model reads every line of your repository in seconds. It has never once heard about the outage that put that validation check there.

PAAD is how you stay on top of it — the same review layers your team already believes in, applied at the speed the assistant is working.

The four letters

Four points where the AI is about to decide something for you:

Area	What it means
Pushback	Argues with your spec before anyone builds it
Alignment	Checks that the plan and the spec actually say the same thing
Architecture	Finds the structural debt while it's still cheap to fix
Discipline	Yours, not the tool's — running the first three when the deadline says don't

The first three are reviews you run. The fourth is the one thing in the list the assistant will never bring for you.

Your team already runs specs, tests, code review, CI, QA, and incident response — layers that exist because mistakes are cheap to fix early and expensive to fix late, and because humans are stochastic. AI is stochastic too. PAAD's argument isn't that AI needs special safeguards; it's that AI needs the same safeguards, running fast enough to keep up with it.

It doesn't replace your current AI-assisted development tools; it complements them. You like Superpowers? Use it with PAAD.

PAAD supports Claude Code natively, installs into 70+ other agents with one npx command, and ships as an experimental Pi package. Hand-copying the pre-converted Kiro/Antigravity/Cursor tree still works and is now deprecated.

Who's driving

Most organizations adopting AI right now have it backwards. A developer tells the AI what to do and hopes the AI can take over. The AI is happy to oblige — it always is — and the developer finds out what it decided when the code lands.

That's AI-driven engineering: the assistant sets the pace, and the engineers are downstream of decisions they never saw made.

PAAD replaces it with engineering-driven AI. Same speed, opposite direction: you see what the AI is about to do while you can still change it, and you make the calls.

	AI-driven engineering	Engineering-driven AI
The spec	Whatever you typed, unchallenged	pushback argues with it before anyone builds it
The plan	Assumed to match the spec	alignment checks both directions
The code	A green CI run	agentic-review puts six specialists on the PR
The structure	Discovered later, expensively	agentic-architecture finds it while it's cheap
The decisions	The model's	Yours, on the record

You stay in the driver's seat. That is the point, and it's also the cost: PAAD gives you visibility and