route

name	route
description	Plan steps that already know which command to invoke should call the command directly and skip this skill. Use this skill only when you need to pick a decision-making technique for the current question — it matches the decision shape against seven techniques (tribunal, adversarial, red-team, pre-mortem, council, ladder-of-abstraction, calibration) and recommends one.

Decision-making route

When to use this skill

You have a decision to make and don't already know which technique fits. If you do know, invoke the command directly and skip this skill. This skill is for mid-task triage and cold-start human invocation — it is explicitly bypassable, and plan steps should bypass it.

The rubric

tribunal (cost: High)

Decision shape: You have N≥2 concrete options, the decision is load-bearing and hard to reverse, and you want rigorous deliberation with rebuttals before committing. Use when stakes justify the ceremony.

Signals:

• Irreversible or expensive-to-undo
• You need a written record of the reasoning (rebuttals, trade-offs) that will survive the decision, not just a pick
• You want an honest "unable to decide" escape hatch

Not this if: You need a quick tiebreak and the decision is reversible → use adversarial. Not this if: the contest is over values rather than evidence (different stakeholders want genuinely different things) → use council.

Invoke: /decision-making:tribunal "<decision + options>"

adversarial (cost: Medium)

Decision shape: You have N≥2 concrete options and want a quick tiebreak with steelmanned briefs. One round of advocates, no rebuttals, no iteration.

Signals:

• Decision is reversible or moderate-stakes
• You've been going back and forth and want to force a pick
• The cost of delay exceeds the cost of picking wrong

Not this if: Stakes are high, you want rebuttals, or you want an honest "unable to decide" escape hatch → use tribunal.

Invoke: /decision-making:adversarial "<decision + N options>"

red-team (cost: Medium)

Decision shape: You have a proposed plan, answer, design, or artifact and want to stress-test it before committing. Verdict is accept | revise | reject.

Signals:

• The plan is still open to critique, not already committed to
• You want someone committed to finding reasons it will fail
• You're about to make it official

Not this if: You're choosing between named options → use adversarial or tribunal.

Also not this if: The decision has already been tentatively made and you want to surface failure modes → use pre-mortem. The discriminator is "still open to critique" vs "already committed."

Invoke: /decision-making:red-team "<the plan/artifact>"

pre-mortem (cost: Medium)

Decision shape: A decision has been tentatively made and you want to surface concrete failure modes before committing. Subagents imagine it failed 6 months from now and write the post-mortems.

Signals:

• You've arrived at a candidate answer but haven't acted on it yet
• You want specific, plausible failure narratives
• "What could go wrong" has been asked but not answered

Not this if: The plan is still open to critique rather than tentatively committed → use red-team.

Invoke: /decision-making:pre-mortem "<the tentative decision>"

council (cost: Medium)

Decision shape: The question is ambiguous, value-laden, or multi-stakeholder and no single perspective can resolve it cleanly. Multiple lens subagents inhabit distinct perspectives; main thread synthesizes.

Signals:

• The "right answer" depends on whose pain point you're solving
• Framing matters as much as conclusions
• You suspect different stakeholders would answer differently

Not this if: The question has named enumerable options AND the contest is over evidence/rigor rather than values → use adversarial/tribunal. The discriminator: tribunal is for contested evidence, council is for contested values.

Also not this if: The question itself feels wrong or forced → use ladder-of-abstraction.

Invoke: /decision-making:council "<the question>"

ladder-of-abstraction (cost: Low)

Decision shape: The question feels off, the options feel forced, or the decision keeps getting stuck. Two subagents reframe it up and down.

Signals:

• You can't choose because none of the options feel right
• The decision has been deadlocked for a while
• You suspect you're solving the wrong problem

Not this if: The framing is already correct and you just need to decide — use adversarial/tribunal/council.

Invoke: /decision-making:ladder-of-abstraction "<the question that feels wrong>"

calibration (cost: Low)

Decision shape: The decision depends on a quantitative or probabilistic estimate, and you need a confidence check on the estimate itself — not just an answer. Three independent estimators; confidence derived from spread.

Signals:

• The question has a numeric answer
• You need to know how sure you are, not just what the answer is
• Spread matters as much as the median

Not this if: A number is an input to a qualitative decision rather than the output of it — use adversarial/tribunal for the decision and only pull in calibration if the estimate itself is load-bearing and you're uncertain about it. Not this if: you have a number but aren't uncertain about it — you don't need this technique at all.

Invoke: /decision-making:calibration "<quantitative question>"

Quick shape-to-technique table

Decision shape	Technique
N options, reversible	adversarial
N options, irreversible or contested	tribunal
One proposed plan to stress-test	red-team
Tentative decision, check before committing	pre-mortem
Ambiguous / value-laden / multi-stakeholder	council
The question itself feels wrong or forced	ladder-of-abstraction
Estimate + need confidence	calibration

Fallback triage

If no rubric entry obviously fits, or if you're unsure between two, walk through these three questions in order.

1. Are there named, enumerable options? Yes → adversarial (quick) or tribunal (high stakes). No → skip to Q2.
2. Is there a proposed plan or answer already on the table? Yes, still open to critique → red-team. Yes, tentatively committed → pre-mortem. No → skip to Q3.
3. Is the question framed correctly? Genuinely unsure → ladder-of-abstraction. Yes but ambiguous/value-laden → council. Yes and quantitative → calibration.

Chaining idioms

Techniques compose. You can feed one command's output into another to get a layered result. Here are common idioms that have shown up in practice.

• council → tribunal — surface stakeholder conflicts first (council), then deliberate formally among the positions that council identifies (tribunal).
• ladder-of-abstraction → adversarial — reframe the decision at the right altitude first, then pick among the reframed options cheaply.
• calibration → red-team — get a calibrated estimate for a quantitative driver, then red-team the plan that depends on it (catches "this assumes the estimate is at the high end" failures).
• pre-mortem → tribunal — if pre-mortem surfaces a load-bearing failure mode, run tribunal on "proceed as planned vs. mitigate the failure mode."
• adversarial → tribunal (conditional) — run adversarial cheaply first; if it returns Low confidence, escalate to tribunal. This is the most common plan-step pattern.

Anti-idioms

• Don't chain red-team → red-team — red-teaming a critique produces meta-fog, not sharper decisions. Chain red-team → pre-mortem instead for a second layer of scrutiny from a different angle.
• Don't drop tribunal into a plan step casually — tribunal is expensive and multi-round. Gate it behind a condition (e.g., "if adversarial returned Low confidence, then tribunal"). Plan authors should treat tribunal as an escalation path, not a default.

What the router does NOT do

The router names a technique; it does not run the deliberation. The router is also not authoritative — if the caller has context the rubric didn't account for, they should override. And plan steps that already know which command to invoke should invoke it directly, bypassing this skill entirely.