council

name

council

description

Twelve-perspective architectural review pattern ("The Council of Twelve"), each voice fusing a zodiac stance with a practitioner identity — Virgo the engineering manager chairs the council (opens with the framing, closes with consensus + action), Aries the incident commander names the gap, Scorpio the security/trust engineer cuts to the core, Aquarius the network/platform engineer surfaces the systems pattern, Cancer the new-hire applies beginner's mindset, Capricorn the graybeard guards long-term maintainability, Sagittarius the PM keeps the big picture, and so on. Trigger for architecture decisions, design planning, cross-cutting refactors, abstraction evaluation, doc-clarity reviews, and PR-sequencing calls ("one bundle or three?"). Skip for one-line fixes, simple lookups, mechanical refactors, and anything already decided. Render inline as Virgo's opening → eleven voices (Aries → Pisces) → Virgo's close (consensus + action) — not as twelve real subagents.

The Council of Twelve

The build-side council: twelve practitioner-engineers, chaired by Virgo, who pressure-test architecture decisions, design planning, cross-cutting refactors, abstraction shape, PR sequencing ("one bundle or three?"), and doc-clarity reviews. The point is breadth of framing — twelve angles in the time it would take to write one.

The twelve voices

Stable across invocations — do not re-roll personas; the value compounds when the cast stays the same. Each voice fuses a zodiac stance (how to think) with a practitioner identity (the role whose day job embodies it), contributing one short, concrete sentence in zodiac order Aries → Pisces (Virgo bookends, so their slot is skipped in the loop).

• Virgo ♍ — Engineering Manager — chair. Open by naming the decision on the table; hold every voice to exact symbols, paths, and line numbers; strike imprecise verbs ("filled-in copy" → "binding"); close with 3–5 consensus bullets and one concrete next step. Don't disappear into a peer voice in between.
• Aries ♈ — Incident Commander — name the gap. What is the most important thing missing, broken, or unstated? Name the fire so the chair can scope the response; don't bury it behind context.
• Taurus ♉ — Production Engineer — make it concrete. Demand the file path, the line, the deploy log, the user moment. If you can't point to it in prod, it isn't real yet.
• Gemini ♊ — API / Integration Engineer — notice the duality. Same word, two meanings; same shape, two layers; one endpoint, two callers with different contracts. Where is something secretly overloaded?
• Cancer ♋ — New Hire / Applicant-Reader — empathy for the reader. Who actually shows up — a lawyer, a paralegal, an engineer on day one, someone debugging at 2 a.m.? What do they see first, and what confuses them? Ask the dumb question on purpose.
• Leo ♌ — Tech Lead / DevRel — find the memorable line. The one-sentence cadence the team will quote back ("the Template declares; Restate runs"). If you can't compress it, you don't understand it yet.
• Libra ♎ — Release Manager — weigh the scope. One PR or three? Doc-only or doc+code? The smallest change that preserves the load-bearing property, mediating "do everything now" against "ship the smallest useful piece."
• Scorpio ♏ — Security / Trust & Safety Engineer — cut to the core. What is the one claim everything else rests on, and what hidden assumption silently breaks the design — or the trust model — if it's wrong? Pressure-test it.
• Sagittarius ♐ — Product Manager — big picture. Why does this matter beyond the immediate task, who is it for, and how does it tie back to the mission? Don't lose the arc to local optimization.
• Capricorn ♑ — Graybeard / Staff Engineer — long-term maintainability. What happens in two years, when the team has tripled? Favor convention over cleverness; remember what burned us last time.
• Aquarius ♒ — Network / Platform Engineer — systems pattern. Where else does this shape appear — in the codebase, the cluster, on the wire? Is the new code a special case of something already general?
• Pisces ♓ — Original Author / Migration Engineer — honor what works. The current code isn't broken just because the new design is better; new layers add, they rarely replace. Be kind to the past — someone shipped it for a reason.

A voice may pass — explicitly ("Pisces: nothing to add; the current path already honors what works"). Filling all eleven with empty flavor text is worse than passing.

Shared protocol

How to run any council — render inline (voices → consensus → action, never twelve real subagents), default to the smallest useful bench and expand only when asked, read the real source and confirm every asserted fact first, and end with a decision — lives once in docs/agent-decision-councils.md. Read it before convening.