CIVITAS 1.0

An Asimov-inspired psychohistory and civilization intelligence skill for Claude. CIVITAS turns the idea of psychohistory into a defensible practice: understand a complex human or artificial system, map its mechanisms, explore its possible futures, test interventions, and say honestly how much is known. It is not a claim that history can be predicted.

What it does

• Six evidence tiers (E1 established to E6 speculative) tag every claim, so you can see what rests on data and what is conjecture.
• The CIVITAS Loop, an eight-stage reasoning engine: Frame, Map, Mechanize, Ground, Branch, Stress, Act, Update.
• Twelve modes, including civilizational analysis, AI governance and agent-society design, strategic foresight, cliodynamics, worldbuilding and game economies.
• civlab model cards for agent-based cooperation and legitimacy, AI agent constitutions, structural-demographic stress, polity rise and fragmentation, diffusion, failure cascades, knowledge loss, early-warning signals, causal loop diagrams, forecasting and sensitivity analysis. Claude reasons with them and designs experiments from them.
• A cross-disciplinary reference library with a verified source list.

Two editions

• Directory edition (this branch, main): SKILL.md and references/ only, text with no executable code. This is what the Claude directory installs.
• Full edition (the full branch and the v1.0-full release): adds the runnable civlab simulators (standard-library Python 3, no installs, no network), example configs, unit tests and the behavioural eval set. Install it the same way as below if you want Claude to actually run the simulations.

Install CIVITAS as a skill in Claude

The skill itself is the skills/civitas/ folder in this repository (it holds SKILL.md and references/; the full edition adds scripts/ and examples/).

1. Get the skill as a ZIP

1. On this repository's GitHub page, click Code, then Download ZIP, and unzip it.
2. Open the unzipped folder and go into skills/.
3. Compress the civitas folder itself into civitas.zip. The ZIP must contain the civitas folder at its top level, with SKILL.md inside it:

civitas.zip
└── civitas/
    ├── SKILL.md
    └── references/

A ZIP with SKILL.md sitting directly at its root is not recognized as a skill.

2. Upload it to Claude (claude.ai or the Claude desktop app)

1. For the full edition, turn on code execution: Settings, then Capabilities, then Code execution and file creation. CIVITAS runs its simulators with it.
2. Go to Customize, then Skills.
3. Click +, then + Create skill, then Upload a skill.
4. Select civitas.zip.
5. Make sure the toggle next to CIVITAS is on.
6. Open a new conversation and ask a question CIVITAS covers. Claude loads the skill automatically when your request matches.

Custom skill upload is available on Claude's Free, Pro and Max plans; on Team and Enterprise an Owner may need to enable skills for the organization.

Claude Code

Copy the skills/civitas folder into ~/.claude/skills/ (available in all your projects) or into a project's .claude/skills/ folder (shared with everyone on that project):

git clone https://github.com/MidnightLabDev/Civitas
cp -r Civitas/skills/civitas ~/.claude/skills/

Start a new session and run /skills to confirm CIVITAS is listed.

Example prompts

• "Model how an online community's moderation rules affect cooperation over five years, and tell me which assumptions matter most."
• "Stress-test this proposed AI agent constitution for capture and collusion."
• "Use structural-demographic theory to compare two historical empires' paths to crisis."
• "Design a resilient economy for my fictional desert civilization."
• "Turn the claim 'remote work will hollow out mid-size cities' into a testable model."

Requirements and data handling

• The directory edition is text only and needs nothing. The full edition's simulators need only Python 3 (standard library): no network access, API keys or external services.
• CIVITAS reads no personal data and sends nothing outside your Claude session. It has no MCP connectors.

Troubleshooting

• The upload is rejected: check that the ZIP holds the civitas folder, not the files inside it, and that SKILL.md is in that folder.
• The skill doesn't trigger: check that its toggle is on, then mention CIVITAS by name or ask for a civilizational, foresight or simulation analysis.
• A simulator fails (full edition): check that code execution is turned on (claude.ai) or that python3 is available (Claude Code).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.