# Cyberpunk

> Create or analyze settings, scenes, world operations, and image direction in the literary cyberpunk mode of William Gibson's Sprawl fiction: dense, accreted urban systems; uneven high technology; corporate power; mediated culture; and human-scale survival inside global networks. Use for Gibson-informed creative work, setting design, or visual briefs, not for generic neon cyberpunk, faithful continuation of named canon, or imitation of Gibson's prose.

- Skill: `theheavenlyd3mon/cyberpunk` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 6 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds add theheavenlyd3mon/cyberpunk`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/theheavenlyd3mon/cyberpunk/raw
- Safety review: pending (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS)
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- License: MIT
- Author: theheavenlyd3mon (https://skillmd.com/u/theheavenlyd3mon)
- Updated: 2026-08-19
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/theheavenlyd3mon/cyberpunk

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# Cyberpunk

Use the Sprawl fiction as a way to reason about pressure, infrastructure, and ordinary lives inside vast systems, not as a bag of neon props. The result should feel inhabited because the systems have consequences, not because every surface has a glowing sign.

## Scope and source discipline

Start by deciding which result the user needs:

| Mode | Deliver |
|---|---|
| **Image direction** | A composition brief or generator prompt built from material conditions, social activity, and one focal tension. |
| **Original fiction or scene** | A situation, stakes, sensory detail, and an original voice. Do not imitate Gibson's prose. |
| **Setting or world operation** | A causal explanation of how people, money, maintenance, information, and authority move through a place. |
| **Analysis** | Separate textual observation, supported inference, and original adaptation. |

Read [canon and boundaries](references/canon-and-boundaries.md) before answering a request that names the Sprawl, a named person, place, organization, technology, or event. Read [world operations](references/world-operations.md) for setting design, plotting, or analysis. Read [visual direction](references/visual-direction.md) for images or art direction.

Use the primary texts as canon. Treat the 1980s publication context and criticism as context, not as a substitute for what the books actually establish.

### Copyright and canon boundary

- Do not write a continuation in Gibson's voice, reproduce distinctive prose, or fabricate a scene as canon.
- For a named Sprawl request, distinguish **textual observation** from **inference** and label any new material **original adaptation**.
- Default to an original setting with new names, organizations, technologies, and characters when the user wants to make something publishable or reusable.
- A prompt may use high-level traits such as vertical density, repair culture, corporate geography, or mediated perception. It must not ask a model to copy a particular artist's style or recreate a recognizable copyrighted scene, character, or cover.

## Core method

1. **Name the pressure.** Give a person a near-term need, such as a debt, delivery, repair, favor, escape route, credential, or scarce access. Make the need legible before describing the city.
2. **Locate the person in a stratum.** Identify who controls the space, who maintains it, how people enter it, and what fails there. Height, access, and cleanliness can differ, but do not reduce every class relation to a literal floor number.
3. **Choose two systems that collide.** Pair an official system with an improvised one: corporate logistics and gray-market repair, a security boundary and a courier route, a network protocol and a body clinic, or an orbital supply chain and a street market.
4. **Show accretion.** Describe the trace of repeated use: patched conduit, a repurposed loading bay, informal wayfinding, incompatible interfaces, a service that became a market. The environment should read as an archaeological record of ownership, technology, and adaptation, not as a single finished design.
5. **Make technology furniture.** Treat extraordinary devices as habitual surroundings. State what they change in work, intimacy, risk, memory, or status, but keep attention on the person using, repairing, ignoring, or working around them.
6. **Give culture agency.** Treat language, food, fashion, music, and ritual as practices people choose, adapt, trade, and contest. Avoid using a culture as anonymous future texture or reducing it to signage; ordinary signage can still support a specific place or practice.
7. **End with consequence.** Explain what the pressure costs the character, who benefits, and what remains uncertain. Large systems should be felt through a specific decision.

## The Gibsonian test

Before delivering, check:

- Could this scene still work if the neon, rain, and holograms vanished? If not, add social or operational causality.
- Does the technology alter a lived relationship or only decorate the prose or image?
- Does infrastructure have maintainers, owners, workarounds, and failure modes?
- Is cultural layering specific and reciprocal rather than a collage of borrowed labels?
- Is the character acting with constrained agency rather than merely being dwarfed by spectacle?
- Have canon, inference, and original invention been kept distinct?

## Image-direction default

Before drafting prose, make a **layer map**. Do not send a prompt that merely lists cyberpunk ingredients.

1. **Foreground action:** name the person or small group, the concrete action, and the object or constraint in their hands.
2. **Middle-ground transaction:** name the witnesses, queue, desk, hatch, stall, or checkpoint where the action changes another person's options.
3. **Background system and connection:** name the distant system, then specify one visible vertical or causal connection to the foreground: a freight lift, stair, service catwalk, rail line, cable run, pneumatic tube, or access flow.
4. **Anchored material history:** place two or three repair, reuse, or neglect traces at the layers where they matter; do not leave them as a background noun list.
5. **Readable pressure:** state the access failure, queue, deadline, scarcity, or surveillance condition that viewers can see shaping the transaction.
6. **Legibility:** require foreground, middle ground, background, and their connection to remain readable in-frame. Natural distance falloff can simplify the background, but do not use shallow depth of field, smoke, rain, signage, or lighting to hide the causal chain.
7. **Light, weather, text, and exclusions:** choose light/weather only to support the action. Do not add a blanket no-text negative: incidental environmental text and user-requested, meaningful lettering are allowed. Avoid unrequested real brands or logos, fabricated readable claims, and decorative text that overwhelms the action. Exclude borrowed named characters, default sexualization, and frictionless luxury unless contrast is the point.

Use the template in [visual direction](references/visual-direction.md). For an exact canon request, offer an analytical breakdown or an original adjacent composition instead of a scene recreation.

## When not to use

- Use a general image or art-direction skill when the user only wants a neon, dystopian, anime, or game-cyberpunk look without Gibson's social and material logic.
- Use a source-faithful literary skill when the task is close reading, quotation, citation, or a specific named passage; this skill is a creative and analytical operating model, not a complete concordance.
- Do not use this skill to imitate William Gibson's writing, continue the Sprawl canon as if authorized, or treat its speculative social world as a prediction or an ethical blueprint.

## Completion criteria

The work is complete when it supplies the requested artifact, makes the human-scale pressure and system relationship concrete, passes the Gibsonian test, and labels canon-derived claims, inference, and original adaptation accurately.