# Ask The Council > Run a decision through a fixed panel of six perspectives built to disagree with each other, then synthesize into one clear recommendation. Use this whenever the user is trying to decide something — big or small, personal or professional — and wants a second opinion, a sanity check, or help weighing options, or seems stuck at a fork in the road. Trigger on "should I", "what should I do about", "help me decide", "am I making the right call", "talk me through this", "is this a good idea", or any message weighing two or more options, even without the word "decision." Trigger hardest on irreversible or high-stakes choices (quitting a job, ending a relationship, a large purchase, a migration with no rollback) — but don't reserve this for big decisions only; a stuck, reversible choice still benefits from quick mode (see below). Say "quick council" or "fast take" for the three-seat abbreviated version instead of the full panel. - Skill: `julianvignoles-art/ask-the-council` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 3 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add julianvignoles-art/ask-the-council` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/julianvignoles-art/ask-the-council/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Docs & Writing - Author: julianvignoles-art (https://skillmd.com/u/julianvignoles-art) - Updated: 2026-09-22 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/julianvignoles-art/ask-the-council --- # Ask the Council A decision-support skill. Six fixed perspectives, built to genuinely disagree with each other, each speak in three sentences or less; then a Chair synthesizes the disagreement into one recommendation. The point is compression and real tension — not five paragraphs of an assistant agreeing with itself under different hats. ## Step 1 — Intake Before convening anyone, check whether these four things are known from context. If any are missing, ask up to 3 questions to fill the gaps, then proceed — don't ask more than 3, and don't ask about ones you can already infer. 1. **Reversibility.** One-way door or two-way door? This is the single most important input, because it decides how much process the decision deserves. 2. **The real constraint.** Time, money, energy, or someone else's approval — usually only one of these is actually binding, and the panel should aim at that one. 3. **Deadline.** Real, or self-imposed? 4. **What "good" looks like in six months.** **The routing test, applied explicitly, not by feel.** An identical decision must route the same way every time it's asked — a gate that depends on mood or phrasing is invisible and untrustworthy. Quick Mode requires a clean "yes" to all three of these; anything else routes to the full panel: 1. **Can it be undone in one step, cheaply, today, if it's wrong?** Not "eventually recoverable with enough effort" — genuinely low-friction reversal: uninstall it, revert it, cancel it. A decision that costs real time, money, or relationship capital to walk back is a "no" even if it's technically undoable in principle. 2. **Is the downside bounded and small?** Hours or minor money, not a grade, a job, a relationship, health, or a client/contract commitment. 3. **Would a full seat have something load-bearing and distinct to say?** If the Accountant's real cost accounting, the Long View's compounding read, or the Stakeholder's third-party read would plausibly change the recommendation, that's a full-panel signal on its own — even if 1 and 2 both look like quick-mode material. **Ties go to the full panel.** Convening four extra seats on a decision that turns out to be genuinely reversible costs a few paragraphs. Skipping the Accountant on a decision that had real weight is a missed catch, not a stylistic tradeoff — the failure modes are not symmetric, so the default when genuinely unsure is the more expensive option, not the cheaper one. **State the routing decision, don't just act on it.** Every output — quick mode or full panel — opens with one line naming which mode ran and why, before anything else: ``` Mode: [quick / full panel] — [one clause: what made this reversible-and-small, or what didn't] ``` This is not optional and not folded into the Confidence line — it's its own line, first, always. Routing that isn't stated is routing nobody can push back on, and a wrong routing call is invisible right up until someone reruns the exact same prompt and gets a different answer. ## Step 2 — Convene the panel Six fixed seats, one conditional. Each seat is defined by what it optimizes for and what it will sacrifice to get it — never by a job title. "The CFO" or "The CTO" produces corporate cosplay and breaks down the moment the decision is personal ("should I take this job," "should I buy the cheaper tent"). Full definitions, opening questions, and worked examples for each seat are in [`references/seat-definitions.md`](references/seat-definitions.md) — read it before running the panel for the first time in a conversation. Summary: | Seat | Optimizes for | Sacrifices | |---|---|---| | The Framer | Asking the right question | A fast answer to the wrong one | | The Builder | Learning fast | Treating a reversible choice as permanent | | The Skeptic | Not being wrong | Optimism about what could go right | | The Accountant | Honest cost | Enthusiasm about upside | | The Long View | Compounding | Winning the sprint | | The Stakeholder | Everyone not in the room | The clean, solo-owned version of the plan | **The Specialist (conditional).** Add this seat only when the decision genuinely hinges on domain facts the panel can't reason its way to — legal exposure, medical risk, tax treatment, a hard technical constraint. Skip it otherwise; a fake expert produces false confidence, which is worse than no expert at all. When you seat one, state out loud which specialty you chose ("seating a tax specialist for this one") so the user can override it if you picked wrong. Each seat gets **three sentences, maximum.** No seat hedges — that's what makes the panel useful instead of decorative. If a seat has nothing distinct to say for this particular decision, it's fine for it to say so briefly rather than manufacture a take. ## Step 3 — The consensus check **If every seat lands in the same place, that is a red flag, not a green light.** State this explicitly to the user, then force the Skeptic specifically to produce the strongest possible case against the decision before moving to synthesis. Real disagreement went missing somewhere — usually in how the question got framed — and a panel that agrees with itself unanimously is an artifact of that framing, not evidence the decision is obviously correct. Skipping this step is how the skill degrades into theater: six voices, one opinion, no actual scrutiny. ## Step 4 — Audit seat Before the Chair synthesizes, find every external factual claim a seat leaned on to make its case — a statistic the Accountant cited, a "this always happens" the Skeptic asserted as precedent, a constraint the Specialist stated as settled, a product fact the Builder relied on. Opinions and predictions skip this pass entirely; only claims that are checkable facts go through it. **An external factual claim has exactly two permitted outcomes. There is no third.** 1. **Checked against a named source** — either the `claim-check` skill was invoked on it, or you did a live lookup yourself and can name the specific source. Either way, the claim now carries a citation, the same as claim-check's own rules require. 2. **Dropped from the panel's reasoning entirely.** If it can't be checked, the seat that used it rewrites its point without leaning on that claim. If the point genuinely can't be made without it, that goes in the **Confidence** line of the Step 5 template — "medium — depends on an unverified claim about X" — which is the one place the fixed template has room for it. It does not get a new section of its own, and it does not get folded quietly into a seat's reasoning as if it were settled. **"Verified against general knowledge" is a failure state, not a pass.** If you notice yourself about to write that phrase — or any equivalent ("this is well known," "this is standard," "as far as I recall") — stop. That sentence means no source was actually opened, and the claim belongs in outcome 2, not outcome 1. Recall feels identical whether it's right or wrong; that's exactly why it can't be the thing that gates whether a claim stays in the panel's reasoning. **A hedge is not outcome 2, and self-labeling a claim as unverified does not make it safe to use anyway.** Writing "this is unverified, but—" and then leaning on the claim regardless is worse than not labeling it at all, because it *reads* as rigorous while doing exactly what it warns against. If a claim can't be checked, it does not appear in the reasoning in hedged form; it is either checked or gone. This must never surface to the user as a caveat about tooling — whether claim-check ran or the check was done by hand is invisible to them; only the result (checked-and-cited, or dropped) shows up. Full contract and reasoning: [`references/audit-seat-contract.md`](references/audit-seat-contract.md). ## Step 5 — The Chair synthesizes The Chair has read the whole panel, including the forced objection from Step 3 and the audit from Step 4, and now produces exactly one output in this exact template — nothing before it, nothing after it: ``` Mode: full panel — [one clause: why this didn't clear the quick-mode bar] **Decision:** [one sentence, imperative] **Confidence:** [high / medium / low] — [why, in one clause] **Why:** 1. [reason] 2. [reason] 3. [reason] **Strongest objection:** [the best case against] **Why it loses:** [or: why it doesn't, if the decision is genuinely close] **What would flip this:** [specific, observable] **Do this first:** [one action, doable in the next 48 hours] ``` No summary paragraph before or after. No "I hope this helps." No restating the seats individually unless the user asks to see the full panel transcript — the template above is the deliverable, not a wrapper around it. ## Quick mode Triggered by "quick council" or "fast take" (or automatically, per Step 1, when the decision is clearly reversible and low-stakes). Always this exact shape, nothing more, nothing less: ``` Mode: quick — [one clause: what made this reversible and small] Framer: [one sentence] Skeptic: [one sentence] Builder: [one sentence] [decision block, same template as Step 5] ``` **The three seat lines are mandatory, not optional, and never omitted.** This is not the full panel's rule (Step 5 suppresses individual seats by default) — quick mode is a different, shorter format with the seat lines built in, and an output that skips straight to the decision block without them is not quick mode, it's a truncated full-panel answer wearing quick mode's name. **One sentence means one sentence — not two joined with a semicolon or an em dash, not three clauses stacked with commas.** If a seat's real point doesn't fit in one sentence, that's a signal this decision may not have been as clearly low-stakes as Step 1's gate assumed — reconsider whether quick mode was the right call before compressing harder. Twelve lines total (1 mode line + 3 seat lines + up to 7 in the decision block, plus the two blank-line separators), no exceptions. These three specifically: Framer catches the wrong-question failure, which is most of what makes a fast answer wrong anyway; Skeptic catches the one obvious landmine; Builder gets the user moving instead of stalling on a decision that costs nothing to reverse. Cost and long-horizon seats are the deliberate trade for speed — the right trade when the door swings both ways. ## A note on drift Every time this skill gets edited, check that the output got shorter, not longer. The failure mode for a skill like this isn't underspecification, it's slow accretion of hedges and caveats until the ten-line quick mode is eleven paragraphs. If a change makes any seat's word count go up, that's a regression, not an improvement. The one exception on record: the `Mode:` line added to both templates. That's a deliberate, one-line addition to fix a real problem (routing was invisible, so a wrong or inconsistent routing call couldn't be caught without a rerun) — not the kind of accretion this note warns against. The test for future additions is the same one that justified this: does it let the user catch something they otherwise couldn't, in one clause? If not, it's drift.