The Sovereign Engineer

The assessment's cognitive read — the six-level ladder, the three disciplines, and the weakest-discipline-as-ceiling heuristic — is set out in The Sovereign Engineer by Russ Miles (Habitat-Thinking).

Buy or read on Leanpub: leanpub.com/thesovereignengineer

What the book contributes

• The six levels of AI collaboration literacy, L0 Aware of the landscape through L5 Sovereign engineering — the cognitive ladder.
• The three disciplines — Context Engineering, Architectural Constraints, Guardrail Design — that run through every level.
• The habitat-thinking lens: the idea that the collaboration environment — the habitat — is the unit of leverage, not the individual prompt.

The fourteen-dimension habitat maturity model comes from the companion Agentic Experience 5-Level Habitat Maturity Model; the AI Literacy framework's ALCI instrument drew its operational axes from it. See the model reference.

How the assessment uses it

The reading path at the end of every report points you to the specific chapter that closes your weakest discipline gap — gap-anchored, not a generic recommendation to "read the book". The point is to give a team the one next read that moves them, matched to where the assessment found them weakest.

Going further

If the assessment shows your thinking has outrun your habitat — or you simply want the full toolkit behind the framework — the ai-literacy-superpowers plugin is the canonical implementation. See Why it is self-contained for how this instrument relates to it.