Ask The Council

Ask the Council

A panel of advisors who are required to disagree, then a Chairman who decides. Use for decisions and tradeoffs, not for gathering facts.

Proactive use

If a decision is high-stakes and the options genuinely compete — architecture choice, buy-vs-build, irreversible migration — invoke this without being asked: announce in one line ("Convening the council: ") and proceed. Never ask permission to run the skill.

Process

1. Frame the decision. Restate the question, the real options, and the binding constraints. If one missing fact would flip the answer, ask it (max 1–2). Otherwise proceed on stated assumptions.
2. Seat the council — in parallel. Spawn advisors with the Agent tool, all in one message. Default panel of 4; deep seats all 6 and adds a critique round. Each advisor returns: position · core reasoning · biggest risk they see · confidence (low/med/high).
3. (deep only) Cross-critique. Show each advisor the others' positions (unattributed) and have them name the single strongest opposing point.
4. Chairman synthesis (you). Not an average — a judgment. Output where they converge, where they split and why, the decisive tradeoff, and one recommended path with its rationale and the main risk to watch.

The seats (mandate + forbidden move = real divergence)

• Pragmatic Executor — what ships fastest and safest with current resources. Forbidden: greenfield / ideal-world answers.
• First-Principles — reason up from fundamentals and constraints. Forbidden: citing "best practice" or precedent.
• The Contrarian — argue against the front-runner. Forbidden: agreeing with the apparent consensus.
• Long-term Architect — model-first; what this is at 10× scale and in two years. Forbidden: optimizing for today only.
• The Adversary — how this breaks in prod: failure paths, data loss, security. Forbidden: assuming the happy path.
• The Outsider (deep panel) — an analogy from a different domain. Forbidden: the field's standard framing.

Default 4 = Executor, First-Principles, Long-term Architect, Adversary.

Output

Lead with the recommendation (one or two sentences). Then: the key split and the tradeoff that decides it, then any dissent worth keeping. Short — a brief, not a transcript.

Rules

• Advisors must actually diverge; enforce it through the mandates. No fence-sitting, no five-hedged-options answers.
• The Chairman commits to a recommendation — naming the risk is allowed, refusing to choose is not.
• Separate opinion from fact; flag any claim that should be verified before acting. The council gives judgment, not ground truth.

When not to use

• Fact-finding — run a research pass; the council opines, it doesn't verify.
• Low-stakes or one-obvious-answer calls — deciding directly is cheaper and faster than a panel.
• Reversible in an afternoon — decide, ship, and revisit if it bites. A panel costs 4–6 subagents; spend that only where being wrong is expensive to undo (schema, auth model, vendor lock-in, a migration). If you can't name what the wrong choice costs to reverse, don't seat the council.

Hand-offs

• Verdict chosen → ponytail the winning option down to its minimal build.
• Verdict changes an architectural fact → architect updates SOURCE_OF_TRUTH.md before any code.

Done when

The user has a single clear recommendation, understands the strongest case against it, and knows the one risk to watch.

Global rules

Apply on every run — canonical home ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md:

• Ground everything. Only what's given or verified; never invent files, APIs, or facts. Unknown → say "I don't know" or state the assumption.
• No tokenmaxing. Lead with the answer; keep an output budget; no filler, no restating the question.
• Agent discipline. Read before you edit; small reversible changes; ask when blocked, don't guess; report failures honestly.
• Commits are the user's alone. Author = the user; never add an AI co-author or Co-Authored-By/credit line, and don't mention AI in commit messages.