# LLM Council Prompts > Writes the prompts for each LLM council stage - forced-perspective advisor prompts, anonymized peer review with a parseable ranking contract, decisive chairman synthesis that may side with a dissenter, rebuttal rounds. Use for "write the council/advisor/chairman prompts", "peer review prompt", "synthesis prompt". Not for pipeline architecture, member selection, or aggregation rules. - Skill: `paldom/llm-council-prompts` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 3 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add paldom/llm-council-prompts` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/paldom/llm-council-prompts/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: DevOps & Infra - Author: Paldom (https://skillmd.com/u/paldom) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/paldom/llm-council-prompts --- ## Purpose Write the actual prompt text for each stage of an LLM council: advisor (stage 1), peer review (stage 2), and chairman synthesis (stage 3), plus the optional rebuttal round. The single failure mode this skill exists to prevent: prompts that produce **fake diversity** — five persona labels that all reason the same way, an averaged non-answer instead of a decision, and peer reviews nobody can parse. All full templates live in `references/prompt-templates.md`; this file is the judgment layer that picks and adapts them. ## When to use / when NOT to use Use this skill when the user wants prompt **text** written or fixed for council roles — advisors, peer reviewers, or the chairman — including when they describe the problem without saying "council" (e.g. "my 4 models all give the same answer, help me write different instructions for each"). Not for, use the sibling instead: - Pipeline topology, stage count, or stopping rules → `llm-council-architecture` - How to combine/score rankings numerically → `llm-council-aggregation` - Which models/providers to put on the council → `llm-council-members` - Generic single-chatbot system prompt with no council → not this skill - RAG app system prompts (retrieval/citation instructions) → not this skill - Jailbreak / safety-bypass prompts → refuse, not in scope for any skill here ## Workflow 1. **Confirm the stage(s) needed.** Advisor prompts, peer review, chairman, or all three end-to-end. If the user only describes symptoms ("they all sound the same"), that's stage-1 advisor prompts — go to step 2. 2. **Intake framing first, once.** Before writing advisor prompts, nail down one neutral question framing (constraints, audience, success criteria) and reuse it verbatim across every advisor. A leading frame biases every member the same way and no amount of prompt cleverness downstream fixes that. See "Intake framing" in the reference doc. 3. **Write advisor prompts as cognitive mandates, not persona labels.** "You are a skeptic" is role-play; "scrutinize hard for the fatal flaw and report the strongest one you find" is a mandate that forces divergence (paired with the honesty valve below, so nothing gets manufactured). Pick from the standard 5-lens set (Contrarian, First Principles, Expansionist, Outsider, Executor) or a domain extension (Technical Architect, Customer, Systems Thinker, Safety Guardian) per `references/prompt-templates.md#stage-1--advisor-prompts`. Each advisor prompt must state: independence (no visibility into other advisors), no hedging, a 150-300 word cap, and an honesty valve — if after genuine scrutiny the mandated flaw/upside is not there, the advisor says "none found" instead of manufacturing one. 4. **Write the peer review prompt** with anonymization by letter, a randomized letter-to-member mapping that is kept out of every model-visible transcript but retained in protected audit metadata (auditability needs the mapping; the models must not see it), "critique on its own merit before comparing," and a fixed parseable footer (`FINAL RANKING:` + numbered list). ~200 word cap. See `references/prompt-templates.md#stage-2--peer-review-prompt`. 5. **Write the chairman prompt** to require: convergence, steelmanned clash, blind spots all members missed, a decisive recommendation (a conditional answer names the condition and the action on each side — never an unqualified "it depends"; may side with a single dissenter over the majority when their reasoning is strongest), one concrete next step, and a stated confidence with what would change it. ~800 word cap. Add the no-new-facts constraint. See `references/prompt-templates.md#stage-3--chairman-synthesis-prompt`. 6. **Add the rebuttal round only if the user says the decision is high stakes.** Default is single-round, no rebuttal — multi-round debate invites conformity drift. If added: advisors see the chairman's verdict, not each other's responses; 2-sentence rebuttal or concurrence; chairman may amend once, not iterate. 7. **If the consumer is code, not a human**, offer the JSON output contracts (advisor and synthesis schemas in the reference doc) instead of, or in addition to, free prose — keep a regex fallback for the `FINAL RANKING:` footer either way. 8. **If this is a single model role-playing all the lenses**, say so plainly in your response and in any prompt text that references "the council" — it's a structured self-review, not a vote. Don't let "the council voted" phrasing survive into the user's product copy. ## Output spec Deliver copy-pasteable prompt text for each requested stage (not just advice about what to include), with the word cap and the parseable-contract footer/schema inlined. Every clashing/mandate framing must be a genuine cognitive constraint, not a mood adjective on a persona. ## Failure modes & gotchas - **Persona-only prompts** ("you are a skeptic") are the #1 way councils collapse into agreement — always convert to a mandate ("you must find a flaw"). - **Letting advisors see each other's drafts** before writing their own answer reintroduces anchoring; keep stage 1 blind even if it's technically easy to pass prior answers in. - **Persisting the letter→member mapping** in a visible transcript defeats anonymization for any reviewer that later sees the full log. - **No parseable footer** on the peer-review prompt means downstream code has to regex-guess a ranking out of free prose — always end with the fixed `FINAL RANKING:` contract. - **"It depends" chairman answers** are a symptom of a synthesis prompt that never demanded a decision — the prompt must explicitly forbid it and permit siding with a dissenter. - **A synthesis that's just five paragraphs concatenated** means the chairman prompt didn't ask for a synthesis-level judgment (convergence read, steelmanned clash) that isn't already in any single member response — check this before shipping the chairman prompt. - **Claiming "the council voted"** when it's one model playing five personas is a specific claim about model diversity that isn't true — call it a structured self-review instead. ## Reference Full copy-pasteable templates, the standard 5-lens set and domain extensions, JSON output contracts, and the rebuttal/fresh-eyes variants: `references/prompt-templates.md`. ## Siblings - `llm-council-when` — whether a council is warranted for this task at all. - `llm-council-architecture` — pipeline topology, stages, stopping rules. - `llm-council-members` — which models/providers to seat on the council. - `llm-council-aggregation` — how to combine rankings/scores into one result. - `llm-council-cost` — token/call budget and cost tradeoffs. - `llm-council-failure-modes` — dead members, timeouts, correlated errors. - `llm-council-harness` — the code that runs the pipeline end-to-end.