Selvedge vs Skillier.ai

Selvedge and Skillier.ai are both inference engines & infra tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

Selvedge

Selvedge is a local MCP server that AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) call as they work, logging the reasoning behind every change into a SQLite file that lives next to your code under .selvedge/. Queries are entity-scoped — you ask about users.email or deps/stripe, not line numbers — so the answer surfaces in the same terms you search in. The vendor describes zero telemetry, no accounts, and no external servers; everything stays on disk. The wall appears when your team needs cross-repo provenance or wants to pipe this data into an existing observability stack — Selvedge emits records but does not integrate with those systems out of the box.

Skillier.ai

Skillier sits between you and your AI client, detecting what domain you're working in and loading the relevant skill — finance modeling, legal reasoning, DevOps runbooks — into the context without you leaving the interface. The Lite version is MIT-licensed and runs offline, which matters for air-gapped environments where cloud-dependent tooling is a non-starter. The routing model hands control back through an AskUserQuestion prompt, so you confirm the skill selection rather than having it decided for you. That model works cleanly for single-domain sessions. Blended workflows — writing copy while checking financial assumptions, for instance — require you to manually re-route between skills, and the seams show.

Attribute	Selvedge	Skillier.ai
Pricing	Free	Paid
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	No
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Linux, macOS, Windows (via Python)	Claude Desktop, Claude Web, Claude Code CLI, OpenClaw
Released	2026-05	—
Pros	Reasoning is captured in the same context window that produced the change — not reconstructed from the diff afterward — which means the intent survives even when the original prompt, the developer who wrote it, and the model version are all gone. Entity-scoped queries (selvedge blame payments.amount, selvedge diff users --since 30d) let you ask about the things you actually search for rather than hunting through line-level history, so a schema audit that would take an afternoon takes a single command. Fully local storage in a SQLite file with no accounts, no telemetry, and no external servers, which means sensitive schema and API change history never leaves the machine — a hard requirement in compliance-heavy environments. Provider-agnostic MCP integration wires into Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot through a single setup command, so teams already using any of those agents get provenance logging without changing their workflow. Full-text search across all logged events (selvedge search "stripe") and changeset grouping (selvedge changeset add-stripe-billing) mean you can reconstruct the full scope of a feature build after the fact, which is the audit trail that git log alone cannot provide.	Offline skill access via the self-hostable Lite version, so air-gapped teams and low-connectivity environments can load domain expertise without a live API call — something cloud-only tools in this category cannot offer. Skill routing that triggers without leaving the chat interface, which means the context window you've built up in a session doesn't get abandoned every time you need to shift to a different domain. MIT-licensed Lite version with no paid tier required, so teams that need to audit, fork, or self-host the code have a legal path to do that without a procurement conversation. Explicit AskUserQuestion confirmation before a skill loads, so you stay in control of what gets injected into context — preventing the silent prompt stuffing that degrades output quality when auto-routing guesses wrong.
Cons	Selvedge has no API and no export integration — teams that need to push reasoning records into an existing compliance platform, a data warehouse, or a centralized observability system must write their own pipeline against the SQLite file, adding a maintenance surface that grows with audit requirements. The store is scoped to a single local project directory; teams running multi-repo codebases where an agent change in one repo depends on a change in another get no cross-repo provenance, and at that point teams managing compliance across repositories will move to a dedicated audit-log solution that operates at the organization level. Selvedge only captures what the agent explicitly logs through the MCP tool call — if an agent skips the log_change call, makes changes outside a supported tool, or the MCP connection drops mid-session, that change has no recorded reasoning and the gap is invisible in the history.	Multi-domain sessions hit the routing model's friction ceiling fast: each skill switch requires a confirmation prompt, so a workflow that blends financial modeling with technical writing generates repeated interruptions — teams doing this regularly report falling back to manual context pasting because it's faster. No API surface is described, which means teams who want to embed skill routing inside a pipeline, a CI step, or any system outside Claude Desktop and Claude Web have no integration path — at that point they are looking at building their own context-injection layer or switching to a tool that exposes programmatic control. Scoped exclusively to Claude Desktop and Claude Web at time of review, so organizations standardized on other AI clients — GPT-4 via ChatGPT, Gemini, or internal models — get no benefit and need a different solution entirely.

Bottom line

Selvedge is free while Skillier.ai is paid; Selvedge is open source. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Comparison data is sourced and verified by the AIDiveForge data pipeline. AIDiveForge is editorially independent.