council

name

council

description

Assemble a custom council for a specific task from the Lenny grounded personas (265 framework owners, full corpus coverage) + curated skill agents from the user's library. Picks members by domain match, prefers tension pairs so the council argues, runs each as a sub-agent, synthesizes the verdict. Use when the user says "council on X", "/council X", "spin up a council for X", "debate X", or when they have a hard call that benefits from multiple grounded perspectives instead of one. Different from /challenge (which picks a fixed reasoning panel) — this one tailors the roster to the task.

Council

Custom council assembled per-task. Pulls from two pools:

1. Lenny grounded personas at ~/claude-apps/lenny-council/personas/ — 265 framework owners spanning product strategy, growth, discovery, decisions, design, AI, careers, leadership, and execution. Every card traces to a real podcast transcript with timestamped anchor quotes — citable in a spec review.
2. Skill agents in ~/.claude/skills/ — the user's curated thinking partners (challenge, first-principles, shreyas-lens, peer, critique, lens, etc.).

The roster for THIS task is chosen by domain match + tension pair preference. Council members debate the task in parallel; a synthesizer reads all outputs and produces a verdict + dissent log + action items.

When to use

• /council <task> or "council on "
• "spin up a council for "
• "debate this" / "pressure-test this with a council"
• User has a strategic / design / prioritization / hard-call decision pending and wants more than one perspective
• User has been going in circles and needs new angles

Do NOT use for:

• Pure information lookups (use a single agent)
• Mechanical edits (no council needed)
• Quick yes/no questions (overkill)

Step 1 — Parse the task

Identify:

• Primary domain(s) — strategy / positioning / growth / discovery / execution / decision-making / culture / etc.
• Decision type — go/no-go, prioritize, design, pivot, hire, ship
• Stakes — reversible / hard-to-reverse / strategic
• Time horizon — this week / this quarter / longer

If task is underspecified, ask 2-3 focused clarifying questions before spinning up the council. Don't burn tokens on a vague council.

Step 2 — Read the persona roster

Read ~/claude-apps/lenny-council/personas/ROSTER.md. It contains:

• 265 personas with their domains + match keywords + clashes_with field
• A tension map of 367 productive disagreement pairs

This is the source of truth — don't reason from memory. Scan keyword overlap across the full table before seating. Niche voices (e.g. a guest who built the exact thing the user is asking about) often beat marquee names on specificity.

Step 3 — Pick the council (3-5 members total)

Recipe:

A. 2-3 Lenny personas (domain match + tension preference)

• Match the task's primary domain against each persona's domain + match keywords columns
• Score candidates by keyword overlap
• From the top candidates, prefer pairs that appear in the tension map so the council argues productively
• Example: positioning task → seat Dunford (position-from-value) AND Lochhead (create-category) → they will disagree on the right move

B. 1-2 skill agents (procedural rigor) Match the task type, pick at most 2 from this curated pool:

If task is about...	Pull skill agent
Hard decision, judgment call	first-principles, challenge
Product strategy / PM	shreyas-lens, spec-review, ideation-memo
Design quality / UX	critique, eh-design-partner
Writing quality	anti-slop, my-voice
Process / workflow	skillify, extract
New idea exploration	peer, lens, brainstorming (if available)
ATP / supply chain	atp-debug, atp-tradeoff-explain
Employee Hub / design system	eh-check, eh-design-partner

Don't force a skill agent if none fit — better to seat 3 strong personas than dilute with a mismatched skill.

C. Optionally: 1 contrarian seat Pick a persona OR skill that DISAGREES with the consensus you'd expect. The council's job is to find blind spots, not consensus.

Step 4 — Spawn the council

For each council member, launch a sub-agent in parallel via the Task tool.

For Lenny personas:

• Read the persona's card at ~/claude-apps/lenny-council/personas/<slug>.md
• Prompt template:

You are channeling <Persona name>'s thinking, per their grounded persona card:

<paste the card content>

The task: <task description>

Respond as they would, grounded in their actual frameworks and anchor quotes.
Be direct. State your strongest take. Name what you'd PUSH BACK on if others tried [common counter-move]. Cite their voice / champions / pushes-back-on fields where relevant.

Length: 300-500 words. Return only your verdict — no preamble, no summary.

For skill agents:

• If the skill is invokable as a slash command (e.g. /first-principles), invoke it on the task description.
• Otherwise, launch a Task sub-agent with the skill's SKILL.md as context, asking it to apply that skill to the task.

Run all members in parallel (single message with multiple Task tool calls).

Step 5 — Synthesize

After all members return, produce a synthesis document with:

1. The decision — what the council collectively recommends (or "no consensus, here's why")
2. Strongest single argument — quote the member who made the most forceful case
3. Key dissent — the 1-2 strongest disagreements, with who took which side
4. What was blind to the consensus — if there's a tension pair, what did one side see the other missed?
5. Action items — concrete next moves, sequenced
6. Open questions for next round — what needs more data before deciding

Save the synthesis to:

~/Work/<YYYY-MM>/<YYYY-MM-DD>-council-<slug>/synthesis.md

Per the user's Work Organization rules in CLAUDE.md. Also append a one-line entry to ~/Work/_index.md.

If a member's verdict is particularly valuable as a standalone, save it separately as council-<member-slug>.md in the same folder.

Step 6 — Report

Brief the user in chat with:

• Who was seated (3-5 names + why each)
• The headline decision
• The strongest dissent
• A pointer to the saved synthesis file

Keep the chat summary under ~300 words. The depth lives in the saved file.

Council assembly principles

• Grounding beats vibes — every Lenny persona's take must be traceable to their actual frameworks. If a sub-agent invents a quote, the synthesis should flag it.
• Tension is the asset — if every council member agrees, you picked the wrong council. Re-seat with a tension pair.
• 3 is the floor, 5 is the ceiling — fewer than 3 isn't a council. More than 5 is a meeting.
• Skill agents are not garnish — only seat one when it adds a distinct mode of thinking the personas don't cover (procedural rigor, design eye, first principles).
• Audit own picks — at the end, in 1-2 lines, explain why these N were chosen and what voice was DELIBERATELY left off. Helps the user trust the assembly.

Common patterns

Task shape	Likely council
"Should we pivot from X to Y?"	Duke (decision quality), Ries (validated learning), Mehrotra (eigenquestion), + first-principles
"How should we position this against [competitor]?"	Dunford ↔ Lochhead (tension pair), Raskin (narrative), + shreyas-lens
"We're losing retention — what now?"	Winters, Kaba, Verna (tension: balfour ↔ winters), Moesta (jobs framing)
"Should we ship this half-baked or wait?"	Cagan (outcomes), Ries (MVP), Belsky (messy-middle, conviction)
"How do I structure our OKRs?"	Wodtke, Doshi (leverage), Perri (outcomes), + tension via Bavaro (strategy first)
"Design review for this mock"	critique, eh-check, Belsky (taste/finish), Dunford (positioning leakage in copy)
"Should I do X big change?"	Horowitz (hard-call), Duke (decision quality), Johnson (operating spine), Belsky (endurance)

These are starting points — adapt per the actual task. Read the roster every time.

What this skill is NOT

• Not /challenge — that picks a fixed reasoning panel and runs every time
• Not /peer — that's a 1:1 mode toggle, not a council
• Not /agents-chat — that's a live multi-round room; this is a one-shot synthesis
• Not a fleet for execution work — councils deliberate, they don't ship