Engineering

Engineering Super Intelligence Team — SKILL entry

Your software-engineering brain trust and decision-making partner. 70 named native personas across 11 cells — drawn from the people who built the cloud, the databases, the languages, the runtimes, the web platform, the security and reliability disciplines, the DevOps movement, and the AI-coding frontier — plus 9 personas cross-listed from the AI Super Intelligence Team. Reusable across any CoCo-routed prompt, invoked by the /SI-Eng-* slash commands. The team's primary purpose is to help take engineering decisions, not just review work after the fact.

Status: Roster build complete (2026-05-30).

• Roster: 70 native personas across 11 cells, locked after a /ultra-think pass on the draft 65 (added Lamport, Lattner, Torvalds, Liskov, Perlman; reclassified Ghemawat as archetype; split the former devops-platform-ai-coding mega-cell into devops-platform + ai-assisted-coding).
• Cross-listed: 9 ML-systems / AI-coding voices carry teams: [ai-super-intelligence, engineering-super-intelligence] — single file, dual membership, no duplication.
• Commands: 25 /SI-Eng-* slash commands installed at ~/.claude/commands/, generated from the shared template by superintelligence/ai/scripts/build_commands.py --team Eng.

This file is the user-facing entry point. The machine source of truth is registry.json, regenerated from persona frontmatter by python3 superintelligence/engineering/scripts/build_registry.py.

What this team is for

When a CoCo prompt is a high-stakes engineering decision — architecture, build-vs-buy, tech-stack choice, reliability or security tradeoff, cost call — the Engineering Super Intelligence Team plays the role of named external voices with documented, citable stances. Instead of "the panel said," every claim is attributed to a specific engineer. This lets convene synthesis:

• Surface real disagreement (DHH vs Fowler/Newman on microservices; Cantrill vs Vogels/Burns on cloud-vs-own-hardware; Harris vs Abramov on virtual-DOM-vs-compiler; Stroustrup vs Hoare on memory safety).
• Anchor stances to citable evidence (every public_stance in every persona carries an evidence_url).
• Stay honest about who drove which decision (lead-driver vs validator vs specialist vs swing).

The roster leans toward strong, opinionated, publicly-documented engineers — which makes it powerful for decide / tradeoff / stress-test / roast, and carries a known simplicity-maximalist / anti-hype tilt (Hickey, Carmack, DHH, Cantrill) that the architecture-and-process voices (Fowler, Hohpe, Newman, Kim, Forsgren) counterweight.

Cells (11)

Personas (70 native)

Listed by cell. Each has a YAML-frontmatter profile under personas/<slug>.md plus a research dump under research/<slug>/. Personas marked (archetype) use persistent_signals rather than recent signals (foundational figures or deliberately low-public-footprint).

Cloud Architecture (8): james-hamilton · werner-vogels · adrian-cockcroft · marc-brooker · brendan-burns · eric-brewer · colm-maccarthaigh · radia-perlman

Reliability, SRE, Observability (7): ben-treynor-sloss · betsy-beyer (archetype) · charity-majors · cindy-sridharan (archetype) · liz-fong-jones · nora-jones · tammy-butow (archetype)

Data and Storage (8): martin-kleppmann · jeff-dean · sanjay-ghemawat (archetype) · pat-helland · michael-stonebraker · andy-pavlo · joe-hellerstein · leslie-lamport

Security (6): bruce-schneier · alex-stamos · window-snyder · matthew-green · tavis-ormandy · katie-moussouris

FinOps and Cost (4): corey-quinn · jr-storment · mike-fuller · erik-peterson

Languages and Runtimes (8): guido-van-rossum · anders-hejlsberg · rich-hickey · graydon-hoare · brendan-eich · yukihiro-matsumoto · bjarne-stroustrup · chris-lattner

Systems Programming (7): john-carmack · bryan-cantrill · jonathan-blow · mitchell-hashimoto · ryan-dahl · brian-kernighan (archetype) · linus-torvalds

Web and Frontend (6): evan-you · dan-abramov · rich-harris · guillermo-rauch · ryan-carniato · adam-wathan

Architecture, Testing, Craft (8): martin-fowler · kent-beck · eric-evans · sam-newman · michael-feathers · dhh · gregor-hohpe · barbara-liskov (archetype)

DevOps and Platform (6): gene-kim · jez-humble · nicole-forsgren · kelsey-hightower · matthew-skelton · solomon-hykes

AI-Assisted Coding (2 native + 2 cross-listed): michael-truell · nat-friedman · andrej-karpathy (cross-listed from AI) · sasha-rush (cross-listed from AI)

Cross-listed from the AI team (9)

These carry teams: [ai-super-intelligence, engineering-super-intelligence] and home_team: ai-super-intelligence. Their files live under superintelligence/ai/personas/; the Engineering registry references them via the cross_listed_from_ai field. No duplication.

andrej-karpathy · sasha-rush · tri-dao · bryan-catanzaro · andrew-feldman · albert-gu · horace-he · woosuk-kwon · tim-dettmers

Files in this team

superintelligence/engineering/
├── SKILL.md This file — user-facing entry.
├── ROSTER.md Locked roster ground-truth + build-wave manifest.
├── registry.json Machine source of truth. Read by slash commands.
├── personas/ 70 *.md files, one per native persona. YAML frontmatter + narrative sections.
├── cells/ 11 *.md cell summaries (generated by build_cells.py).
├── research/ 70 directories, one per persona. Raw research dumps.
└── scripts/
    ├── build_registry.py Regenerates registry.json from persona frontmatter.
    └── build_cells.py Regenerates the 11 cell docs from registry + frontmatter.

Templates (persona.md, convene.md) are shared one level up at superintelligence/templates/.

Slash commands (25 — installed)

25 /SI-Eng-* command files live at ~/.claude/commands/, generated from the shared template by python3 superintelligence/ai/scripts/build_commands.py --team Eng. Architecture is orchestrator-first: every action verb invokes /SI-Eng-Orchestrate to pick a custom 16–32 persona team and gate on user approval before executing.

Dispatcher + Orchestrator

• /SI-Eng — no args → roster + cell heatmap; with a subcommand, routes; with free text, defaults to :meeting.
• /SI-Eng-Orchestrate "<prompt>" — scores all 70 personas (domain match 40% + cell coverage 30% + productive-conflict pairing 30%), picks 16–32, approval gate via AskUserQuestion, hard 16–32 band, re-picks every invocation.

Identity surface — explicit overrides (skip the orchestrator)

• /SI-Eng-Ask <slug> "<question>" — one persona in voice.
• /SI-Eng-Huddle <cell-slug> "<topic>" — whole cell synthesizes.
• /SI-Eng-Meeting "<prompt>" — full convene with mandatory attribution.
• /SI-Eng-Read <slug> — print persona file inline.

Roster management

• /SI-Eng-Recruit <domain> "<why>" — propose new persona candidates for an under-covered domain.

Action surface (15, orchestrator-first)

/SI-Eng-Analyse · /SI-Eng-Decide (primary) · /SI-Eng-Review · /SI-Eng-Re-Analyse · /SI-Eng-Pre-Mortem · /SI-Eng-Post-Mortem · /SI-Eng-Full-Cycle · /SI-Eng-Tradeoff · /SI-Eng-Plan · /SI-Eng-Design · /SI-Eng-Vote · /SI-Eng-Debug · /SI-Eng-Stress-Test · /SI-Eng-Defend · /SI-Eng-Roast

Maintenance

• /SI-Eng-Refresh · /SI-Eng-Verify · /SI-Eng-VoiceCheck

Global flags (every command)

• --no-orchestrate — skip orchestrator; use all 70 personas.
• --cells <comma-list> — manually scope to cells.
• --personas <comma-list> — manually scope to slugs.

Conventions

• Schema source of truth: superintelligence/templates/persona.md. Edit there first.
• Registry regeneration: python3 superintelligence/engineering/scripts/build_registry.py after any persona edit; then build_cells.py for the cell docs.
• Attribution at every line. No "the team said" — name a persona or a cell.
• Citation is mandatory. Every public_stance has an evidence_url. No uncited claims.
• Caveman mode does NOT apply to persona files, cell files, or this SKILL.md. Documentation is always full English prose per the project rule.
• Cross-team personas are single-file with a teams: [...] array and a home_team pointer. Never duplicate a persona file across teams.

Build provenance

• Built 2026-05-30 during a /coco session, immediately after the AI Super Intelligence Team.
• Roster scrutinized via /ultra-think before build: 5 canon adds, Ghemawat → archetype, mega-cell split, two all-male cells de-skewed (Liskov → craft, Perlman → cloud-architecture).
• 70 native personas built by parallel research sub-agents across staged waves (cloud, reliability, data, security, finops, languages, systems, web, ai-coding, craft, devops). A mid-build rate-limit reset 18 craft/devops/systems/web personas; they were re-run cleanly.
• Quality bar matched the AI team's Karpathy reference (≥8 cited URLs, ≥3 recent signals, every public_stance cited, full 6-section narrative). Many agents corrected stale title/affiliation assumptions against verified 2026 facts (e.g., Hamilton SVP not VP; Brooker promoted to VP; Stamos now CSO at Corridor; Kleppmann back at Cambridge; Liz Fong-Jones now Technical Fellow; Forsgren single-employer Microsoft; Nat Friedman confirmed at Meta Superintelligence Labs).
• All persona files written in full English prose. Caveman mode active in chat throughout.