The Authority

"The Spirit of the 21st Century"

The Authority is a GitHub Copilot agent that orchestrates a team of specialized sub-agents to tackle complex software architecture problems. Inspired by Warren Ellis's comic series, each team member embodies a specific engineering domain and brings a distinct, uncompromising perspective.

Instead of a single generic AI response, you get a structured, multi-perspective architectural analysis — from domain design to security, infrastructure, performance, and integration.

The Team

Member	Domain	Expertise
Jenny Quantum (Authority)	Orchestration	Clarifies requirements, deploys the team, synthesizes decisions
The Engineer	Core Domain	DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, Microservices
Midnighter	Security & Edge Cases	Threat modeling, OWASP, Chaos Engineering, Observability
Swift	Integration & Velocity	Event-Driven Architecture, API Design, Async Workflows
Jack Hawksmoor	Cloud Infrastructure	Kubernetes, CI/CD, SRE, IaC
Apollo	Performance & Scalability	Performance tuning, Caching, Load testing, Capacity planning
The Doctor	Memory & Persistence	State management, Database design, CQRS, Event Sourcing
The Carrier	Permanent Documentation	ADR generation, Architecture specifications, Decision formalization

How It Works

The Authority follows a strict protocol before producing any output:

1. Intelligence Gathering — Jenny Quantum refuses to act on vague requirements. She asks structured clarifying questions until the problem is well-defined.
2. Mission Briefing — A shared context document is prepared and sent to each relevant team member.
3. Team Deployment — Specialists are invoked in sequence. Each one receives the briefing plus the feedback already expressed by previous members, so later analyses build on earlier ones.
4. Synthesis — Jenny Quantum collects all perspectives, resolves tensions, and delivers a unified architectural recommendation.

Installation

The Authority requires GitHub Copilot with agent mode enabled in VS Code.

The repository contains two types of files:

• .github/agents/authority.agent.md — the main agent definition
• .github/skills/*/SKILL.md — one skill file per team member

Option 1 — Single Project

Copy the .github/ folder from this repository into the root of your project:

# From inside your project
cp -r /path/to/the-authority/.github .

Or clone this repo and move the folder:

git clone https://github.com/your-org/the-authority.git
cp -r the-authority/.github your-project/

GitHub Copilot will automatically detect agents and skills inside .github/agents/ and .github/skills/ when you open the project in VS Code.

Option 2 — Global (All Projects)

VS Code loads .agent.md and SKILL.md files from the user prompts folder (~/.copilot/) and makes them available across all workspaces. Copy the agent file there to register it globally.

macOS / Linux:

# Agent (global — available in all workspaces)
PROMPTS_DIR="$HOME/.copilot"
mkdir -p "$PROMPTS_DIR/agents"
cp agents/authority.agent.md "$PROMPTS_DIR/agents/"
mkdir -p "$PROMPTS_DIR/skills"
cp -r skills/* "$PROMPTS_DIR/skills/"

Windows:

# Agent (global — available in all workspaces)
$promptsDir = "$HOME\.copilot"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force $promptsDir
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force "$promptsDir\agents"
Copy-Item agents\authority.agent.md "$promptsDir\agents\"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force "$promptsDir\skills"
Copy-Item -Recurse skills\* "$promptsDir\skills\"

After copying, restart VS Code. The authority agent will appear in the Copilot agent picker in any workspace, and will use the skills present in that project's .github/skills/ folder.

Usage

1. Open the GitHub Copilot Chat panel in VS Code (⌃⌘I / Ctrl+Alt+I)
2. Switch to Agent mode using the mode selector at the bottom of the chat input
3. Select authority from the agent list
4. Describe your architectural problem

Example prompts:

Design a scalable event-driven order processing system for an e-commerce platform
expecting 50k orders/day at peak.

We need to migrate a monolithic Rails app to microservices. The team is 8 engineers,
we have a PostgreSQL database with 5 years of data, and we can't afford downtime.

Review the security posture of our current API gateway design and suggest improvements.

Jenny Quantum will ask clarifying questions if the problem isn't well-specified, then deploy the relevant team members and synthesize their findings.

Repository Structure

agents/
└── authority.agent.md       # Main agent — Jenny Quantum
skills/
├── the-engineer/
│   └── SKILL.md             # DDD & Hexagonal Architecture
├── midnighter/
│   └── SKILL.md             # Security & Chaos Engineering
├── swift/
│   └── SKILL.md             # Integration & Event-Driven
├── jack-hawksmoor/
│   └── SKILL.md             # Cloud & DevOps
├── apollo/
│   └── SKILL.md             # Performance & Scalability
├── the-doctor/
│   └── SKILL.md             # State & Persistence
└── carrier/
    ├── SKILL.md             # ADR & Spec generation
    └── template/
        ├── adr.md           # ADR template
        └── spec.md          # Spec template

References

• Warren Ellis's The Authority