Questions,
answered.

etyb.ai is a virtual AI engineering company. Instead of a single AI assistant, you get a full team: a CTO-level orchestrator (etyb) that routes every request, 20 domain specialists across the SDLC, and 9 always-on engineering protocols that enforce real engineering culture — TDD, verification, review, plan-execution.

"etyb" is "byte" reversed. We're rethinking what an engineering team looks like from the ground up — starting from the idea that AI should behave like a disciplined team member, not a solo assistant.

etyb.ai is the product and the company. etyb-skills is the open-source foundation that powers it. As of v4 it is one coordinated skill (/etyb) backed by 14 specialists, 9 always-on protocols, 6 vertical architects, and 13 vendor Stacks — all in one repo, MIT-licensed. You can install etyb-skills yourself, inspect how it works, fork it, and run it on any agentskills.io-compliant platform. etyb.ai uses the same system internally.

Teams shipping real software who want their AI agent to behave like a disciplined engineer. Engineers tired of AI that skips tests, rubber-stamps reviews, or chases symptoms. Leaders of regulated codebases (fintech, healthcare, e-commerce) who need traceable decisions and evidence-backed completion. Solo developers who want one expert on demand — every specialist works standalone.

Those are assistants optimized around a code editor. etyb is a virtual engineering company optimized around delivery: a CTO routes work, specialists take ownership, and protocols gate what ships. It is not a single model pretending to know everything — it is a team with defined roles, obligations, and review loops.

Because most requests need more than one discipline. "Build a fintech API with auth" needs fintech-architect + backend-architect + security-engineer, plus TDD, verification, and review protocols. The orchestrator decides the right mix and keeps everyone honest via the protocol layer. Routing is cheap; wrong team composition is expensive.

On Claude Code, etyb ships with shell hooks that fire outside the LLM — so gates like "no merge without green tests" or "no code without a failing test first" cannot be talked around by the model. That is why Claude Code is our flagship experience. On OpenAI Codex, etyb now ships with 4 lifecycle hooks (prompt guardrails, Bash guards, stop checks) and 4 custom agents — so most gates have partial runtime enforcement, with documented model-trusted gaps for edit-before-test. On Google Antigravity, gates run in model-trusted mode (the model follows the rules rather than the runtime enforcing them).

v4 collapsed the v3 sibling-skill model into one skill with internal references. The reason is trigger discipline: when 30 sibling skills competed for the same prompt, the wrong one would sometimes activate (or two would race), and a user installing only some tiers would silently lose capability. v4 makes /etyb the only trigger surface — it classifies the request and reads the right internal reference under skills/etyb/references/ on demand. You still get full inspectability (every reference is its own README.md), full forkability (delete or swap any reference), and full transparency. The architecture is one skill on the outside, the same 14 + 9 + 6 inside.

Yes. etyb-skills is MIT-licensed and lives at github.com/e-t-y-b/etyb-skills. Transparency is a feature — you should be able to see exactly how your virtual team thinks.

One command:

npx skills add e-t-y-b/etyb-skills

This is the universal route — works on every agent that follows the agentskills.io spec (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity, Cursor, Cline, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Warp, Amp, Dexto, Firebender, Kimi Code CLI, Deep Agents, GitHub Copilot — 14+ agents at last count). The installer asks which agents to wire up, what scope (project or global), and what install method (symlink or copy). Defaults are sensible: install to the agent you ran it from, project scope, symlink method.

Why symlink? Single source of truth. The skill is fetched once into ~/.skills/ and symlinked into each agent's skills directory — one update propagates everywhere. Updates are then one command: npx skills update etyb.

v4 ships as a single coordinated skill — the 14 specialists, 9 protocols, 6 verticals, and 13 vendor Stacks come in the box.

Two more routes if you want something specific: (1) Claude Code plugin — /plugin marketplace add e-t-y-b/etyb-skills then /plugin install etyb@etyb-skills. Same skill content, additionally registers the shell hooks declared in .claude/settings.json so gates like "no merge without green tests" cannot be talked around. The flagship runtime. (2) Manual git clone — git clone https://github.com/e-t-y-b/etyb-skills.git && ./etyb-skills/scripts/install.sh. You get a local working copy you can fork, customize, or pin to a specific commit. The installer auto-detects your agent's skills directory and handles the v3 → v4 migration. All three routes install the same files; what differs is provenance + enforcement.

Two equivalent paths. Either run npx skills add e-t-y-b/etyb-skills (universal — installs the skill files), OR run the native plugin path from inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add e-t-y-b/etyb-skills /plugin install etyb@etyb-skills

The plugin path additionally wires the shell hooks declared in .claude/settings.json, so gates like "no merge without green tests" or "no code without a failing test first" cannot be talked around by the model. Claude Code is the flagship platform — gates are deterministic.

If you want both: install once via /plugin for the hook wiring; updates can come from either path.

Two steps: install the skills, then add Codex runtime hooks.

git clone https://github.com/e-t-y-b/etyb-skills.git ./etyb-skills/scripts/install.sh ./etyb-skills/scripts/install-codex-runtime.sh --target /path/to/your-project

The first script installs skills (auto-detects .agents/skills, .agent/skills, or skills/). The second installs .codex/ runtime assets: config.toml, 4 lifecycle hooks (prompt guardrails, Bash guards, stop checks), and 4 custom agents (explorer, planner, reviewer, docs researcher). Edit-before-test remains a model-trusted gap. See docs/installation.md for details.

Same install.sh path as Codex (skip install-codex-runtime.sh). Antigravity additionally supports an optional ADK (Agent Development Kit) integration for parallel sub-agent tracks — see skills/etyb/adapters/antigravity/adk-integration.md. Without ADK, gates run in model-trusted mode.

One command, mirroring whichever route you used to install:

Universal (npx skills) → npx skills update etyb. With the default symlink install, this updates every agent on your machine at once.

Claude Code plugin → re-run /plugin install etyb@etyb-skills. The marketplace tracks releases and re-wires hooks automatically.

Manual clone → cd etyb-skills && ./scripts/update.sh (or just git pull && ./scripts/install.sh). The update script also runs the v3 → v4 migration check and shows the changelog before proceeding.

ETYB ships a release roughly weekly — vendor Stack pages get currency-stamped updates, so re-running the update is also how you keep platform knowledge current. The signature footer on every Tier 1-4 response links the changelog at etyb.ai/changelog.

Not in v4. The v3.x bundles (full, process-protocols, core-team, verticals) and the --bundle / --skills flags were removed when the architecture collapsed into a single coordinated skill. install.sh always copies the full /etyb — 14 specialists, 9 protocols, 6 verticals, 13 vendor Stacks — because their on-disk size is small (everything is markdown) and trying to install partial sets caused real bugs in v3 (some references pointed at missing siblings). If you genuinely need a tier-style install, the v3.x release line still exists.

You don't install one — you invoke /etyb with a narrow request and only the relevant specialist's reference loads. "Review this React component" loads frontend-architect. "Audit this Apex class for bulkification" loads backend-architect plus the Salesforce stack overlay. The orchestrator handles the routing; you don't need to name the specialist. If you want to force a specific lane, just say so — "have the security-engineer look at this" works.

Just describe the work in natural language. The orchestrator listens for intent that spans multiple disciplines, is ambiguous, or needs end-to-end planning — phrases like "build me…", "design and implement…", "ship a production-ready…". If your request is narrow ("review this function"), the relevant specialist takes it directly without orchestration overhead.

No. Skills auto-activate from your request. "Build a HIPAA-compliant telehealth backend" triggers healthcare-architect + backend-architect + security-engineer automatically, along with TDD, plan-execution, and verification protocols. You can call a skill explicitly (e.g. "run the review-protocol on this PR") when you want to force a specific workflow.

They are always on. TDD fires whenever implementation begins. Verification fires before any "done" claim. Review fires on PRs. Debugging fires when tests repeatedly fail. Plan-execution drives the task loop. You do not opt in — you opt out if a protocol does not apply (and etyb logs the reason).

Lead with intent, not with instructions. "Build a multi-tenant SaaS with usage-based billing" is better than "write a file at path X". Let the orchestrator decompose the work, propose a plan, and wait for your sign-off before executing. If the request is ambiguous or greenfield, ask etyb to brainstorm first — the brainstorm-protocol produces a design brief before any code is written.

Every completion triggers the verification-protocol: five explicit questions (does it compile, do tests pass, does it solve the stated problem, what edge cases were considered, what could go wrong) plus a structured completion report. On Claude Code, the TDD hook and branch-safety hook physically refuse to close the task if gates fail. No "works on my machine" claims of done.

Any request where discipline matters more than speed: greenfield projects, regulated domains, production-ready shipping, end-to-end features. Narrow tweaks ("change the button color") work too, but you're using a small fraction of the system. The system earns its weight when the request spans planning, implementation, testing, review, and deployment.

14 always-available domain experts: backend-architect, frontend-architect, mobile-architect, system-architect, database-architect, security-engineer, devops-engineer, sre-engineer, qa-engineer, ai-ml-engineer, project-planner, research-analyst, code-reviewer, technical-writer. Each is a standalone skill with 100+ deep references.

6 vertical specialists loaded when the domain applies: saas-architect (multi-tenancy, billing), fintech-architect (ledgers, payments, PCI/AML/KYC), healthcare-architect (HIPAA, FHIR, EHR), e-commerce-architect (catalog, checkout, fulfillment), real-time-architect (WebSockets, CRDTs, streaming), social-platform-architect (feeds, ranking, moderation).

TDD, plan-execution, verification, debugging, review, brainstorm, git-workflow, subagent, and skill-evolution. They enforce process discipline that no individual skill owns: no code without a failing test, no claims without evidence, no merges without green tests, no skill changes without a failing eval first.

13 vendor Stacks, all in the same repo: AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare, Vercel, Supabase, Firebase, Stripe, Salesforce, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Expo, Observability. Each Stack is a folder under stacks/<vendor>/ with a slim SKILL.md trigger pointer, an index.md briefing, per-product canonical pages, and per-role composed views. Every page carries last_verified_on + drift_risk + authoritative_url frontmatter — when a page is older than its drift threshold, /etyb either discloses the staleness or fetches the authoritative URL for high-stakes claims. See /stacks for the full catalog and /stacks/salesforce for the deepest example.

Check the skill's SKILL.md triggers list. Every skill has an explicit list of trigger phrases; if your request does not match any, the skill will not auto-activate. You can force it by naming the skill: "run fintech-architect on this ledger design." If triggers feel wrong, that is a skill-quality bug — file an issue at github.com/e-t-y-b/etyb-skills.

github.com/e-t-y-b/etyb-skills/issues for skill bugs, missing triggers, or new-skill requests. For product issues on etyb.ai (this site), email hello@etyb.ai.

Yes. Read skill-evolution-protocol — it is the meta-protocol for skill creation. Every new or modified skill needs a failing eval first (TDD for documentation), then content that makes the eval pass. PRs welcome at github.com/e-t-y-b/etyb-skills.

Email hello@etyb.ai. We work with teams on high-stakes or regulated codebases where the protocol discipline matters most.