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council

/octopus:council pressure-tests one decision from five independent thinking lenses, has them peer-review each other anonymously, and returns a single synthesised verdict — without leaving the current session.

What it solves

A single model answer carries a single blind spot, and on a decision that is expensive to get wrong, that is a problem. The council runs the same question through five lenses chosen for built-in tension, then an anonymous peer-review round forces the arguments to be judged on merit rather than on which lens produced them. The result is the clarity one perspective cannot give.

How it works

The command invokes the council skill, which owns the full four-phase protocol:

  1. Frame — scan the workspace for context and reframe the question into one neutral prompt all advisors receive.
  2. Convene — five advisors answer in parallel, each leaning fully into its lens.
  3. Anonymous peer-review — responses are anonymised A–E and cross-reviewed.
  4. Chairman synthesis — a fixed-structure verdict: agreements, clashes, blind spots, the recommendation, and the one thing to do first.

The verdict is presented in chat as markdown. The council is read-only and writes no files unless --transcript is passed.

--pre-mortem changes the framing, not the machinery. Phase 1 rewrites the question as a post-failure autopsy — the plan shipped six months ago and failed, explain why — and phase 4 returns failure modes ranked by likelihood × impact, each with a mitigation and a tripwire. The five lenses and the anonymous review run untouched, because each lens already fails a plan its own way.

Usage & parameters

/octopus:council <the decision or question>
/octopus:council --transcript <the decision or question>
/octopus:council --pre-mortem <the plan or launch>
  • <the decision or question> — the high-stakes call to pressure-test. Use it for genuine decisions with a tradeoff, not factual lookups or creation tasks.
  • --transcript — also save a council-transcript-<slug>.md in the working directory (otherwise the council writes nothing).
  • --pre-mortem — treat the plan as already failed and have the council explain why. Use it once the call is made, when you want the blind spots before spending the money.

Source: commands/council.md