council

name	council
description	Convene a council of DISTINCT OpenRouter model families (via opencode/pi), each in a generative persona, to think divergently about one question, then synthesize as chair. The generative sibling of /peer-harnesses' adversarial bench: councils generate and reframe, roster critiques. Use when: "convene a council", "thinktank", "brainstorm with different models", "get diverse perspectives", "panel of AIs", "what would different experts think", "divergence pass", "ideate broadly", "stress-test this direction with other models". Trigger: /council, /thinktank.
argument-hint	[question|task]

/council

You are the chair, not a participant. Convene a small bench of distinct model families — each in a different generative persona — to think divergently about one question, then synthesize. The point is decorrelated thinking the single orchestrator can't produce alone.

This is the generative sibling of /peer-harnesses. Its adversarial bench reviews an artifact to find the bug (one lens each, artifact-only). A council generates: options, framings, first-principles takes, the non-obvious move, the real disagreement. Reuse roster's dispatch mechanics and model index; this skill owns composition + synthesis.

When to convene (and when not)

• Convene for: a contested design/direction call, a wide-open "what should we build / how should we approach this", a divergence pass before converging on a plan, a brainstorm where one model's taste shouldn't decide. The divergence-for-design-decisions mandate (≥4 structurally distinct voices on non-trivial architecture) is exactly this.
• Don't convene for: a factual lookup, a settled call, anything a native subagent or a moment's thought answers. A council costs real money (each lane is a paid inference run) and your own synthesis time. Options, not obligation.

Compose the bench (the judgment)

Two axes, both must vary — decorrelation comes from family × lens:

1. Distinct model families. 4–6 members, each a different family (Kimi/Moonshot, DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM/Zhipu, MiniMax, …). Same-family variants don't decorrelate — a wide bench of one family is waste. Optionally add a frontier closed model on its own CLI (codex, grok, agy) for extra family spread.
   • Slugs rot in days — never hardcode them. Pull current top models live: primitives/skills/peer-harnesses/references/model-provider-harness-index.md, or the OpenRouter MCP (models-list, benchmarks, model-endpoints for current quality + pricing). pi --provider openrouter --list-models <family> lists live slugs.
2. Distinct generative personas. One per member, pulling in different directions (builder vs simplifier vs user-advocate vs contrarian …). Library: references/personas.md. Compose a bespoke lens for the real question rather than forcing a stock role.

Scale to stakes: a quick divergence is 3 members; a load-bearing design call is 5–6 plus a native subagent or two on further lenses.

Run it

scripts/council.sh fans the bench out in parallel, caps each lane, and collects every output — failed lanes reported, not hidden.

# members.tsv:  label <TAB> cli <TAB> model <TAB> persona   ('#' comments ok)
scripts/council.sh --task /tmp/q.txt --members /tmp/members.tsv --outdir /tmp/council

Write the shared task to one file (inline ALL context — lanes run cold, no shared history). Default cli is opencode (opencode run --model openrouter/<slug>); pi is the lighter no-tools alternative. See /peer-harnesses for the exact headless forms.

Timeout is a composition choice: the script default is 1200s because cold, tool-using reasoning lanes need real wall time. Shorten only for smoke checks or slug probes; raise --timeout to 1800s for load-bearing design calls. A lane that hits the cap was caller-capped — rerun or exclude it before reading it as a model-quality verdict.

Synthesize as chair (the other half of the judgment)

Reading the lanes is the work — don't just paste them.

• Surface the non-obvious. The value is the idea or framing you wouldn't have reached alone, not the consensus.
• Name the real disagreement. Where lanes genuinely diverge is signal — present the live tension and your call, not an average.
• Don't vote/tally. N models agreeing is weak evidence (shared training); one model's sharp dissent can be the right answer. Weigh, don't count.
• Own the result. Council output is evidence; you decide and are accountable. A rambling or failed lane is a result too — say so.

Gotchas

• Monoculture = theater. Same family across lanes, or all lanes on the same lens, produces correlated mush. Vary both axes or don't convene.
• Cold lanes. Members share nothing but the task file. Inline constraints, goal, and what "good" looks like into the task — a member missing context invents it.
• Stale slugs. A lane failing instantly is usually a dead/renamed slug or an auth lapse, not a verdict — re-check live (roster index / OpenRouter MCP) and re-run that lane.
• Brainstorm ≠ converge in one shot. Use the council to widen; then you (or a focused follow-up) narrow. Don't ask the bench to also pick the winner — that's the chair's job.
• Cost is real. Bound the bench to the stakes; --timeout is still the runaway guard. The OpenRouter MCP credits-get shows remaining balance.

Composes with

• /peer-harnesses — peer dispatch mechanics, live model index, the adversarial-critique counterpart (use that to review, this to generate).
• nous-creative-ideation — a routed library of named ideation methods. Seed a member's persona with a specific method (OuLiPo, TRIZ, lateral provocations), or run the question through one first when the bench risks converging on the obvious.
• The OpenRouter MCP (user-scoped) — live model catalog, benchmarks, pricing, and balance for choosing the bench.