council

You ask one model a question and you get one answer with one blind spot — and no way to tell what it missed. The council skill runs the same decision through five independent thinking lenses, has them peer-review each other anonymously, then a chairman synthesises a single verdict. Adapted from Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Council.

What it solves

A single perspective is a single blind spot, and on a high-stakes call the cost of that blind spot is real. Asking the same model again does not help — it tends to agree with itself. The council manufactures genuine disagreement: five lenses chosen for built-in tension (downside vs upside, rethink-everything vs just-ship, plus an outsider keeping everyone honest), so the decision gets attacked from angles a single pass never reaches. The anonymous peer-review round is what makes it more than “ask five times” — reviewers judge the arguments on merit, not on which lens produced them.

How it works

Four phases, each read-only over the workspace:

1. Frame — scan the workspace for context (CLAUDE.md, a memory/ directory, referenced files, and CONTEXT.md / docs/adr/ when present), then reframe the raw question into one neutral prompt every advisor receives. No opinion is injected; if the question is too vague, the skill asks exactly one clarifying question first.
2. Convene — the five advisors (Contrarian, First Principles, Expansionist, Outsider, Executor) answer in parallel, each leaning fully into its lens.
3. Anonymous peer-review — the responses are anonymised as A–E with a randomised mapping, then each advisor reviews the set: strongest response, biggest blind spot, what everyone missed.
4. Chairman synthesis — one agent produces a fixed-structure verdict: where the council agrees, where it clashes, the blind spots peer-review caught, the recommendation (a real answer, not “it depends”), and the one thing to do first.

The advisors are ephemeral prompt-injected lenses, not roles — the council creates no role file and reuses none (unlike delegate, which dispatches persisted roles). The verdict is presented in chat as markdown; the council writes no files by default — a transcript is opt-in.

When to use

Convene the council for a genuine decision with stakes and a tradeoff — “launch X or Y first”, “is this pivot sane”, “what’s weak in this plan”. Do not convene for a factual lookup, a creation task (“write me a tweet”), or a trivial yes/no with no real tradeoff — just answer those directly. Run interview first when the decision is still fuzzy and needs scoping; reach for delegate when you need persisted specialist roles to do work rather than five lenses to weigh one call.