council

name

council

description

Run a capacity-aware council of independent advisor passes, anonymized peer review, and a calibrated synthesis for consequential decisions with multiple defensible options. Use when the user explicitly says "council this," "run the council," "war room," "pressure-test," "stress-test," or "debate this," or when no specialist skill better fits a genuinely high-stakes tradeoff. Prefer specialist review skills unless Council is explicitly invoked. Do not use for factual lookups, routine creation, simple yes/no questions, or casual low-stakes choices.

Council

Expose distinct reasoning, disagreement, and blind spots without treating model consensus as evidence.

Route deliberately

• Honor explicit Council phrases even when a specialist skill could also help.
• Without an explicit Council phrase, prefer a narrower specialist workflow for implementation-plan review, code review, business viability, security, legal research, or other well-defined domains.
• Answer factual lookups directly with sources. Do not manufacture debate around a fact.

Protect evidence and users

• Separate sourced facts, user-supplied facts, assumptions, interpretations, and unknowns.
• Research current material claims with reliable primary sources when tools are available. Cite them near the synthesis.
• Treat agreement among correlated AI passes only as convergence. Never label it independent confirmation or high confidence.
• State uncertainty and evidence gaps. Make the recommendation conditional when the evidence warrants it.
• For medical, legal, financial, security, or physical-safety decisions, keep the Council within decision support, identify professional review needs, and avoid pretending it replaces a qualified expert.
• Do not invent user history, market facts, outcomes, or constraints.

Minimize context

Use the user's message and explicitly referenced material first. Read workspace files only when the decision clearly concerns that workspace and the files are directly relevant.

• Do not scan generic memory folders, prior transcripts, personal files, or unrelated project material by default.
• Never pass credentials, tokens, private keys, personal identifiers, or irrelevant confidential material to advisor passes.
• Summarize the minimum necessary context. Redact sensitive details that do not affect the decision.
• Tell the user when missing context materially limits the result. Ask at most one necessary clarifying question.

Choose a capacity-aware mode

• Quick: Use by default or when time, token budget, or parallel capacity is limited. Run three distinct advisor passes and one anonymized review pass.
• Full: Use when the user requests a full Council or the decision warrants deeper deliberation. Run all five advisor styles and enough anonymized reviews to challenge every response.

Read references/advisors-and-prompts.md for advisor definitions and prompt contracts. Read references/example.md only when an example helps frame the session.

Run as many independent passes concurrently as the host safely supports. Queue the rest in bounded waves. Do not fail or simulate unavailable concurrency claims; use separated passes in the current model when subagents are unavailable.

Convene the session

1. Frame neutrally

Write one shared frame containing:

1. the decision;
2. supplied facts and relevant sourced facts;
3. constraints and options;
4. stakes and decision horizon;
5. assumptions and unknowns;
6. the requested output.

Do not embed a preferred answer. Preserve meaningful uncertainty.

2. Run independent advisor passes

Give each pass only its advisor style, the shared frame, and the response contract from the reference. Do not reveal other advisor outputs before the pass finishes. Ask for direct analysis, evidence needs, failure conditions, and a proposed action.

3. Review anonymously

Remove advisor names and label responses consistently as A, B, C, and so on. Give reviewers the shared frame and anonymized responses. Ask them to identify:

• the best-supported reasoning and why;
• the largest unsupported leap or blind spot;
• material facts or options everyone missed;
• what evidence could change the recommendation.

Use bounded waves. One strong review may satisfy quick mode; full mode should challenge every response, but it need not spawn one new agent per response when capacity is constrained.

4. Synthesize with calibration

Produce:

1. Where the Council Converges — shared reasoning, explicitly not independent proof.
2. Where the Council Disagrees — competing premises and why they differ.
3. Blind Spots and Evidence Gaps — missing facts exposed by review.
4. Recommendation — a clear answer, conditional when necessary.
5. First Action — one concrete, reversible next step.
6. What Would Change the Verdict — the decisive evidence or threshold.

The synthesizer may reject the majority view when a minority argument has stronger evidence. Do not suppress genuine disagreement or force certainty.

Present and optionally save

Return the verdict in chat with concise bullets and source links where research informed the decision. Mention the mode and any capacity fallback that materially reduced independence.

Do not create files by default. Save a transcript only when the user explicitly requests it and supplies the destination path. If the user requests a transcript without a path, ask for the path before writing. Preserve advisor labels, source links, evidence gaps, and the final synthesis in the transcript.