Why it is self-contained

This plugin does one thing — assess AI readiness — and it does it without depending on anything else. No other plugin, skill, agent, MCP server, or external service. The model, the cognitive ladder, the scoring heuristic, and the evidence checklist are all embedded in the command and skill files in full.

Why standalone matters

• It runs anywhere. Drop it into any repository, in Claude Code or Copilot CLI, and it works — no habitat to install first, nothing to configure.
• The assessment can't drift from its dependencies, because it has none. What it scores against is fixed in its own files and versioned with the plugin.
• It's honest about what it measures. A self-contained instrument has to carry its own model; that forces the model to be explicit and inspectable rather than hidden behind a service.

This is also a harness constraint on the repo itself: the command and skill may not reference or depend on any other plugin, and the dependencies field in the manifest must stay empty. A reviewer can verify it by grepping the two files.

Relationship to ai-literacy-superpowers

This instrument is inspired by the ai-literacy-superpowers plugin — the canonical home of the AI Literacy framework, with its full agent team, harness engineering, governance audit, compound learning loop, and orchestrator pipeline.

What you get here is narrower by design: just the assessment instrument, extracted into a standalone, dependency-free package. If the assessment reveals you want the full habitat — the agent pipeline, the constraint enforcement, the compound learning — that is what ai-literacy-superpowers provides.

The conceptual ground for both — the levels, the disciplines, the habitat-thinking lens — is set out in The Sovereign Engineer.