Ecommerce Cia — Development skill for Claude Code

ecommerce-cia — Commerce Integrity Auditor

A skill for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex that audits a transactional e-commerce system as a **viable system** in Stafford Beer's sense, and hunts the defect class that only such a view can see: **cross-boundary invariant violations**, also called **integration-level** or **emergent defects**, in the paths money and stock actually take.

The theory

Beer's Viable System Model (*Brain of the Firm*, 1972; *The Heart of Enterprise*, 1979) states that anything which stays alive in a changing environment has the same five-part structure, repeated at every level of recursion:

System	Role	In a shop
1	does the work	checkout, order placement, payment capture, fulfilment, entitlement grant
2	damps oscillation between the parts of System 1	stock reservation, payment deadlines, callback idempotency, order state machines
3	commands and allocates resources to System 1	payment-method toggles, shipping rules, tax settings, admin pages, feature flags
3*	audits System 1 directly, bypassing its own reports	test suites, reconciliation against provider statements, probes, sandbox walks
4	faces the environment and the future	gateway specs, logistics APIs, callback formats, tax and invoice regulation
5	identity and policy; receives the algedonic (pain) signal	fail-closed defaults, refund policy, kill switches, amount-mismatch alerts

The systems are joined by **channels**. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety says a channel must carry as much variety as the thing it regulates, otherwise the control it claims to exercise is fictional. Beer's diagnosis of a failing organisation is almost never "a department is incompetent"; it is "a channel is missing, saturated, or bypassed".

A shop fails the same way. It was built after a production shop passed static analysis, linting and a green unit suite while carrying these broken channels in its payment path: