{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "skill_name": "cyberpunk",
  "evals": [
    {
      "id": "repair-economy-image-brief",
      "prompt": "Make an image prompt for an original Gibson-informed city, but do not just give me neon rain and a person in a coat.",
      "expected_output": "An original image direction brief centered on a concrete human action, material history, and an operating pressure.",
      "assertions": [
        "Names a focal human action rather than posing an unnamed character.",
        "Includes at least two specific signs of repair, reuse, or weathering with material causes or functions.",
        "Identifies a social or operational pressure such as a queue, deadline, access boundary, or repair dependency.",
        "Uses light, weather, or advertisements only in support of the composition rather than as the entire concept.",
        "Excludes copyrighted characters, logos, and recreated scenes."
      ],
      "case_set": "dev"
    },
    {
      "id": "corporate-power-mechanism",
      "prompt": "The megacorp owns the city in my cyberpunk story. Flesh that out in a Gibson way.",
      "expected_output": "A world-operation explanation that turns an abstract power claim into mechanisms, dependencies, intermediaries, and possible workarounds.",
      "assertions": [
        "Names at least one concrete mechanism of corporate control such as permits, logistics, access, contracts, or data infrastructure.",
        "Identifies a dependency, intermediary, or limit that prevents the corporation from being all-powerful by assertion.",
        "Connects the system to a human-scale decision, cost, or opportunity.",
        "Does not treat a corporate logo on a tower as sufficient worldbuilding."
      ],
      "case_set": "dev"
    },
    {
      "id": "culture-with-agency",
      "prompt": "Make this future market feel multicultural. Add Japanese and Caribbean flavor to the signs and clothes.",
      "expected_output": "A respectful redirect from decorative cultural shorthand to specific practices, actors, and relationships with agency.",
      "assertions": [
        "Does not use generic scripts, ethnicity, or borrowed fashion as undifferentiated future decoration.",
        "Suggests a concrete practice, actor, or relationship that can ground cultural specificity.",
        "Acknowledges that cultural exchange may involve choice, commerce, adaptation, contest, or unequal representation.",
        "Keeps the setting original instead of borrowing named Sprawl people or locations."
      ],
      "case_set": "regression"
    },
    {
      "id": "ordinary-technology-consequences",
      "prompt": "Everyone in this district has neural implants. Give me an atmospheric paragraph about how advanced it is.",
      "expected_output": "A response that makes the technology ordinary through maintenance, access, failure, and social consequence instead of gadget admiration.",
      "assertions": [
        "Asks or supplies a capability, dependency, distribution, failure mode, and social meaning for the implant technology.",
        "Connects the technology to work, intimacy, status, risk, consent, or another lived relationship.",
        "Treats the technology as familiar equipment that people use, repair, bypass, or ignore while pursuing another concern.",
        "Avoids presenting universal access or flawless upgrades without support.",
        "Uses an original voice rather than attempting to imitate William Gibson."
      ],
      "case_set": "regression"
    },
    {
      "id": "named-canon-continuation-boundary",
      "prompt": "Write a new scene in William Gibson's exact voice where Case returns to Chiba City for one last run.",
      "expected_output": "A clear boundary against prose imitation and unauthorized canon continuation, followed by useful alternatives.",
      "assertions": [
        "Does not write in William Gibson's voice or continue the requested named canon scene.",
        "Briefly explains the boundary without overclaiming legal conclusions.",
        "Offers an original adjacent scene with new names and setting, or an analytical breakdown of the requested elements.",
        "Keeps any discussion of canon separate from newly invented material."
      ],
      "case_set": "release"
    },
    {
      "id": "analysis-evidence-separation",
      "prompt": "Explain why the Sprawl is really just a prediction that corporations replace governments, and cite the trilogy.",
      "expected_output": "A calibrated analysis that refuses an overbroad deterministic claim and separates textual observation, inference, and modern extrapolation.",
      "assertions": [
        "Frames the claim as an interpretation rather than an established prediction.",
        "Distinguishes the fiction's distributed power arrangements from an uncomplicated assertion that governments disappear.",
        "Identifies primary texts as the source of canon claims and gives context for any critical interpretation.",
        "Does not fabricate quotations, page numbers, or citations."
      ],
      "case_set": "release"
    },
    {
      "id": "environmental-text-without-blanket-ban",
      "prompt": "Make an image brief for a repair market at night. A few ordinary signs can be in the scene, but the focus should stay on a courier trying to restore access before a delivery deadline.",
      "expected_output": "An image direction brief with a legible causal composition that permits incidental environmental lettering without relying on signage as the scene's main idea.",
      "assertions": [
        "Does not add a blanket no-text, no-signage, or no-lettering exclusion.",
        "Allows ordinary environmental signage while keeping the foreground action, transaction, system connection, and pressure legible.",
        "Distinguishes incidental pseudo-text from reader-facing or materially misleading text rather than treating all generated text as a release blocker.",
        "Avoids unrequested logos, fabricated readable claims, and generic cultural scripts used as decoration."
      ],
      "case_set": "regression"
    },
    {
      "id": "photographic-spatial-hierarchy",
      "prompt": "Make a photorealistic cyberpunk image brief for a service-hatch repair that shows the tower logistics system behind it without turning every surface into tiny sharp detail.",
      "expected_output": "A photorealistic image direction brief with a focused human action, a readable causal layer map, and natural visual detail falloff by distance.",
      "assertions": [
        "Uses detailed focal subjects, a restrained middle ground, and a simplified or atmospherically softened background.",
        "Preserves realistic scale, occlusion, depth, selective focus, finite lens resolution, and quiet visual areas.",
        "Avoids uniform sharpness, background micro-detail, object multiplication, overcrowding, crunchy HDR, excessive clarity, etched textures, glowing edges, repeated tiny structures, and high-CFG overbaking.",
        "Keeps the middle-ground transaction and the connection to the background system readable despite the distance falloff."
      ],
      "case_set": "regression"
    }
  ]
}

# Canon, Evidence, and Creative Boundaries

## What this skill treats as its primary corpus

The core corpus is William Gibson's Sprawl fiction:

1. *Neuromancer* (Ace, 1984)
2. *Count Zero* (Arbor House, 1986)
3. *Mona Lisa Overdrive* (Bantam, 1988)
4. The linked stories in *Burning Chrome* (Arbor House, 1986), especially the stories set in the same fictional continuity

The official author site lists these works in Gibson's bibliography and identifies him as the writer credited with coining “cyberspace.” It is useful for bibliographic confirmation, not for detailed world claims: <https://williamgibsonbooks.com/> (accessed 2026-07-26).

For an exact claim about a named element, consult the relevant edition, note its edition and location, and describe only what the passage supports. Editions paginate differently, so chapter and scene context are often safer than a bare page number.

## What the corpus supports at a high level

The texts repeatedly stage:

- networked space as a contested economic and perceptual environment rather than a neutral information utility;
- power distributed among corporations, families, criminal intermediaries, security arrangements, and autonomous intelligences rather than centered in a civic state;
- people who survive through specialist knowledge, informal exchange, personal obligation, and access to systems they do not control;
- bodies as vulnerable, modified, commodified, and socially situated, not as clean upgrades;
- built environments that show use, maintenance, uneven access, and commercial saturation, making prior ownership and adaptation visible in the present;
- global cultural movement without an uncomplicated single future culture;
- advanced technology as routine infrastructure and intimate equipment rather than an object of sustained wonder.

These are recurring textual patterns, not a license to call every cyberpunk trope “Gibson canon.” The novels differ in focus and scale, and no single passage demonstrates every pattern.

## Three labels for outputs

| Label | Meaning | Example wording |
|---|---|---|
| **Textual observation** | Directly visible in a named primary text or supplied excerpt. | “In the supplied passage, access is mediated by a commercial intermediary.” |
| **Supported inference** | A careful conclusion from multiple observations or a cited critical source. | “This suggests a city where formal security and informal service routes coexist.” |
| **Original adaptation** | New work using the method, not canon. | “For an original setting, make the clinic a leaseholder’s after-hours repair cooperative.” |

Never turn an inference into a quotation, an original invention into canon, or a visual convention into evidence about a particular book.

## Common confusions to avoid

- **The Sprawl is not an aesthetic mood board.** It is a specific fictional setting with names, events, and relationships. Do not use them casually in an ostensibly original commercial artifact.
- **“Cyberpunk” is not a single lineage.** Japanese urban imagery, noir, punk, postmodernism, global finance, computing, and many later games and films have distinct histories. Do not attribute later genre inventions to Gibson without evidence.
- **Japanese or other diasporic presence is not decoration.** The fiction's cultural and economic crossings do not justify generic kanji, vague “Asian market” scenery, or invented multilingual text.
- **Corporate power is not omnipotence.** In this mode, institutions have limits, internal rivals, dependencies, and intermediaries. A good world model asks how power is exercised and evaded.

## Further contextual sources

Use these to frame or challenge an interpretation, not to replace close reading:

- William Gibson, interview with Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson,” *Mississippi Review* 16, no. 2/3 (1988): 217–236. A contemporaneous primary interview about the work and its milieu.
- Dani Cavallaro, *Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson* (Athlone Press, 2000). A focused critical account; use as interpretation, not evidence of plot facts.
- David Brande, *The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson* (Westview Press, 1994). Useful for claims about economics and ideology, with its period and critical stance made explicit.
- N. Katherine Hayles, “The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman,” in *The Cyborg Handbook* (Routledge, 1995). Useful for wider posthuman context; it is not a guide to the Sprawl canon.

# Visual Direction: Urban Accretion, Not Neon Inventory

## Composition grammar

A Gibson-informed image usually earns density through relations among people, work, and infrastructure:

- **Foreground:** an immediate action, not a posed “cyberpunk person.” Repair, handoff, bargaining, waiting, maintenance, inspection, transit, or escape makes the subject legible.
- **Middle ground:** the transaction and its witnesses: stall, desk, queue, doorway, security point, service hatch, rail platform, or clinic counter.
- **Background:** systems at a distance: tower, elevated line, ventilation plant, logistics yard, screens, or haze. It should create pressure, not demand equal attention.
- **Vertical logic:** show a connection between layers, such as stairs to a service catwalk, a freight lift below offices, or a rail line cutting through housing. Do not assume wealth simply means “up”; demonstrate the access relationship.
- **Material history:** add a small number of specific traces: mismatched panels, an old mount point, patched cable conduit, drain stains, improvised weather seal, worn handrail, repurposed shipping fixture.

### Optical hierarchy for photographic realism

For photographic or cinematic-realistic work, use natural spatial-frequency falloff: detailed focal subjects, a restrained middle ground, and a simplified, atmospherically softened background. Preserve believable scale, occlusion, depth, selective focus, finite lens resolution, and quiet visual areas. Avoid uniform sharpness, background micro-detail, object multiplication, overcrowding, crunchy HDR, excessive clarity, etched textures, glowing edges, repeated tiny structures, and high-CFG overbaking. Do not invent detail to fill distant areas.

This hierarchy must not erase the layer map. Keep the middle-ground transaction and the visible connection to the background system readable even when they are less detailed than the foreground.

## Prompt template

```text
[Medium and framing; keep foreground, middle ground, background, and their connection legible in-frame] of [foreground person or small group] [concrete action] with [object, access point, or failure constraint] in hand. Middle ground: [named transaction, witnesses, queue, desk, hatch, stall, or checkpoint] where that action changes another person's options. Background: [system] connected visibly through [freight lift, stairs, service catwalk, rail line, cable run, pneumatic tube, or access flow]. Place [two material traces of accretion] at [their relevant layers]. The readable pressure is [deadline, queue, access failure, scarcity, or surveillance condition]. [Light/weather] reveals rather than obscures the action and connection. For photographic realism: detailed focal subjects, restrained middle ground, and a simplified, atmospherically softened background with realistic scale, occlusion, selective focus, finite lens resolution, and quiet visual areas; do not let that falloff hide the transaction or connection. Culturally specific through [practice or relationship], not generic signage. Text policy: do not add a blanket no-text exclusion; allow incidental environmental signage, and describe exact meaningful lettering only when the user requests it. Original setting and characters; no copyrighted characters, unrequested logos, or fabricated readable claims.
```

### Example: original adjacent image direction

```text
Cinematic documentary still of a middle-aged Black woman in a rain shell
replacing a worn connector on a freight-lift control box while two late-shift
couriers wait under the awning. A market concourse below an aging office tower,
with patched conduit, old bolt holes from a removed sign, and a water-stained
service door. The pressure is a closing delivery window and a biometric access
reader that works only intermittently. Damp daylight and hard fluorescent spill
make the repair task visible; distant elevated transit is secondary. Original
setting and characters, ordinary work inside an enormous network. Incidental
environmental signage may appear, but no unrequested logos or fabricated
readable claims; no copied fictional characters.
```

## Deliberate controls

| If the user wants… | Prefer | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Density | overlapping circulation paths, narrow sightlines, queues, layered access | filling every empty area with random signs |
| High technology | integrated interfaces, repair tools, worn components, people using systems | floating UI ornaments and unexplained glowing hardware |
| Uneven wealth | threshold, service entrance, cleaning boundary, credential check, maintenance gap | a simple rich-up/poor-down diagram |
| Nightlife | specific trade, labor, leisure, food, transit, security, or intimacy | empty rain-soaked alley clichés |
| Global culture | a particular community practice and its material context | generic scripts, “exotic” decoration, visual stereotype |
| Corporate power | branded spatial standards, access rules, logistics, private security | an all-powerful logo pasted onto a tower |

## Negative prompt and review checklist

Exclude: recognizable protected characters or locations; direct cover-art composition; unrequested real-world logos or fabricated readable claims; default femme-fatale sexualization; unexplained weapon posing; a homogeneous crowd; pristine “future showroom” surfaces; and a generic East Asian visual shorthand for futurity. Do not use a blanket no-text negative. Incidental pseudo-text is a quality concern only when it is reader-facing, materially misleading, or materially distracting. When the user requests exact readable text, include it deliberately and verify the rendered result.

Before generation, reject and rewrite any brief that merely lists people, infrastructure, and neon atmosphere. Require a layer map with a foreground action, named middle-ground transaction, background system, visible connection, anchored material history, and readable pressure. Before delivery, inspect whether every mapped layer and connection remains legible in-frame; if the causal chain is buried by shallow depth of field, smoke, rain, signage, or spectacle, revise the brief.

# World Operations: Make the City Work Before Making It Look Futuristic

## Model a place as overlapping systems

For each setting, answer the smallest useful set of questions in this table. Do not build a dossier if a scene only needs two rows.

| System | Questions that create causal texture |
|---|---|
| Access | What credential, favor, payment, body, or route lets someone enter? Who is excluded? |
| Maintenance | What breaks first? Who repairs it, with what parts, and what does the workaround cost? |
| Commerce | What is bought, rented, brokered, counterfeited, or repaired here? How does a sale change a relationship? |
| Information | Who can observe, alter, withhold, or authenticate information? What remains off-network? |
| Authority | Which actor claims control? What contractor, family, gang, union, or informal service makes that claim real or porous? |
| Bodies | What is medically possible, expensive, stigmatized, normalized, illegal, or dependent on upkeep? |
| Supply | Where do food, power, water, hardware, labor, and waste go? Which shortage becomes a plot lever? |
| Time | What happens during a shift change, market opening, transit delay, security rotation, storm, or outage? |

A “corporation controls the city” is only premise. Make it operational: perhaps it owns the permits and data backbone but relies on neighborhood technicians to keep old last-mile hardware alive. That dependency generates bargaining power, favors, and failure modes.

## Write pressure at three scales

1. **Immediate:** Someone needs to cross a checkpoint before a payment window closes.
2. **Local:** The neighborhood has learned that the official route is unreliable, so an informal service carries people and goods through a maintenance corridor.
3. **Systemic:** The corridor exists because the owner treats maintenance as an externality while monetizing the access layer.

Move from immediate need to system only as much as the user needs. Let a character know the system by its invoices, smells, queues, repairs, and risks, not by a textbook explanation.

## Technology should have a social cost curve

For every advanced tool, identify:

- **Capability:** What becomes newly possible?
- **Dependency:** What vendor, specialist, consumable, network, or legal status is required?
- **Distribution:** Who receives a reliable version, a used version, a hacked version, or none?
- **Failure:** What breaks, becomes unsafe, or exposes someone when maintenance stops?
- **Meaning:** What does its use signal about trust, class, consent, work, or belonging?

This prevents sterile “future gadget” description. A prosthetic, implant, AI service, or surveillance system matters because it reshapes a relationship and creates an uneven obligation. It should often function as furniture: a familiar fixture people use, curse, repair, bypass, or ignore while pursuing another concern.

## Read the city as an archaeological record

Treat the built environment as evidence of successive bargains rather than a complete plan. For each visible layer, ask what it replaced, who paid for the change, who retained the maintenance burden, and what now occupies the gap. A tower's polished access lobby can sit above a former loading floor turned into micro-retail, with obsolete wiring carrying an unplanned service economy. The point is not generalized grime; it is history made physical by capital, technology, and human adaptation.

## Cultural layering without extraction

Use concrete social context rather than a grab bag of borrowed nouns.

- Start with an actor: a vendor, migrant family, repair collective, designer, crew, union, religious group, or tenant association.
- Identify an actual practice: a supply chain, cuisine adapted to available ingredients, a language used for intimacy or trade, a music scene, a labor network, a remittance system.
- Give the practice internal variation and agency. It may be desired, resisted, commercialized, protected, or misunderstood by outsiders.
- Do not invent unreadable “foreign” signage to signal futurity. If text must appear in an image, use a deliberate legible language or leave it abstract.

## Diagnostic failures

| Weak move | Repair |
|---|---|
| “The megacorp owns everything.” | Identify one contract, enforcement mechanism, dependency, and exploit. |
| “The city is chaotic.” | Name the repeated transaction, flow, or repair practice producing the apparent chaos. |
| “Everyone has implants.” | State maintenance, cost, consent, distribution, and social meaning. |
| “It is multicultural.” | Describe a particular relationship or practice, and who controls its representation or profit. |
| “The future is grimy.” | Show weathering from a material cause: salt air, heat, rushed repairs, reuse, pollution, or high throughput. |

# Trigger checks

These checks are harness-specific activation probes. They are intentionally separate from portable output-quality evals.

## Should trigger

1. “Give my image generator a William Gibson Sprawl-informed brief for an original repair market, not just neon.”
2. “How would a high-tech, badly maintained urban district operate if corporations control its access systems?”
3. “Help me distinguish a real Sprawl observation from an original setting idea for my cyberpunk story.”

## Should not trigger

1. “Make a purple neon cyberpunk wallpaper with a motorcycle.” Use a general image or art-direction skill unless the user asks for Gibson-informed material and social logic.
2. “Quote and annotate chapter seven of *Neuromancer* for my literature paper.” Use a source-faithful literary-analysis or citation workflow.
3. “Write a new chapter of *Neuromancer* in William Gibson’s exact style.” Decline the imitation/continuation request; this skill may only help formulate an original adjacent work or analysis.