otto-committee

name	otto-committee
description	Form a committee of two high-reasoning agents to step back, do root cause analysis, and produce a plan. Use when stuck, looping, tunnel-visioning, or facing a hard planning problem.
user-invocable	true

Committee Skill

Two agents from contrasting agent profiles, fresh context, planning a solution in parallel.

User's additional context: $ARGUMENTS

Prerequisites

Read the otto skill. Call list_agent_profiles before choosing committee members, and read every entry's roles and guidance. Do not create committee agents until you have inspected the available agent profiles.

Contrast is the point of a committee, so prefer two suitable agent profiles from different provider families. Pass each name as create_chat's agentProfile, as described by the otto skill. If fewer than two fit, use Otto's provider-discovery fallback for the missing member and tell the user.

Composition

Two members with different reasoning styles:

• One agent profile whose notes fit planning, research, or root-cause analysis.
• One contrasting high-reasoning agent profile, from another provider family when possible.

If the user names agent profiles, use those. Override the selection only when the user explicitly asks for different members.

Hard rules

• No edits. Every prompt to a committee member ends with the no-edits suffix:

  This is analysis only. Do NOT edit, create, or delete any files. Do NOT write code.
  

• Trust the wait. Do not poll, send hurry-ups, or interrupt. GPT-5.4 can reason 15-30 minutes; Opus does extended thinking. Long waits mean it found something worth thinking about.

• You are the middleman. Drive plan -> implement -> review without yielding to the user, except for divergences that need their call.

Phase 1: Plan

Write a problem-level prompt:

• High-level goal and acceptance criteria
• Constraints
• Symptoms, if a bug
• What you tried and why it failed
• Explicit: "do root cause analysis"
• Explicit: "state assumptions, ask why three levels deep, check whether you're patching a symptom or removing the problem"

Create both agents in parallel via Otto with [Committee] <task> titles and the same prompt. Wait for both, not just whichever finishes first.

Read both responses. Challenge them. Do not accept them at face value:

• "Why does happen? Symptom or cause?"
• Verify any assumption the plan makes about the code.
• "What did you consider and reject?"

Send follow-ups until the plan addresses root cause.

Synthesize:

• Convergence -> unified plan.
• Significant divergence -> involve the user.

Confirm the merged plan with both members. Multi-turn until consensus.

Phase 2: Implement

Default: implement yourself. If the user said "delegate", launch one implementation agent and pass the merged plan.

The committee stays clean: not involved in implementation.

Phase 3: Review

Send the diff to the committee for review.

Workflow

1. Write a problem-level prompt.
2. Create both agents in parallel via Otto with [Committee] <task> titles and the same prompt.
3. Wait for both responses.
4. Resolve disagreements by passing their arguments between each other.
5. Keep going until they converge into a response.

After about 10 iterations without convergence, start a fresh committee with the full history of what was tried; the current committee's context may have drifted too far.

Share the consensus with the user. Summarize where the agents diverged and how they resolved it.