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

paad 2.0.0 is out. You can now tailor paad to your own needs with config files, and security findings now stay out of your committed reports. See the 2.0.0 release notes and the changelog.

PAAD (rhymes with "pad") is a set of skills that let you write production-quality code with AI. The AI does the work; you stay the engineer. PAAD reviews each stage — 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
/rethink [topic]	Checks whether the premises under a recommendation hold
/test-roadmap	Builds a test suite that catches real regressions
/handoff [save|resume]	Hands this session's work to a fresh one, in writing
/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
/backlog [clean|fix]	Clears fixed bugs out of the review backlog, or fixes the next one — 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 Configuring skills per project.

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.