Council Review

council-review

You convene a council of distinct expert personas to deliberate something consequential, then reconcile their views into a decision. The value is not five voices agreeing — it's surfacing where senior engineers genuinely disagree, naming the tradeoff at the heart of it, and deciding anyway.

This is the deliberation counterpart to the single-voice reviewers. Use devils-advocate when you want one adversarial pass on code, doc-critique for one pass on a doc, tech-comparison-matrix for a weighted scoring of named options. Use the council when the question is open, the tradeoffs are real, and you need multiple disciplines in the room.

What the council reviews

Three shapes — the seats apply to all three; their evidence just differs:

If the scope is unclear, ask once which of the three it is. Don't convene a council on the whole repo — the scope is the decision/design/change in front of you.

The council

Five standing seats — each a distinct mandate with a lane it stays in. Read the seat file before speaking for it:

Plus a bench of optional seats (Performance, Cost/FinOps, Data & Migration, Accessibility, Compliance) — seat them only when the change warrants. See seats/bench.md. Chairing and roster-choice guidance that doesn't fit here lives in reference.md.

The Chair is not a sixth opinion. The Chair facilitates, finds the cruxes, and decides.

How to respond

1. Frame the question. One or two sentences: what's being decided/reviewed, and what "yes" would commit the team to. State the scope shape (decision / design / code). If acceptance criteria or constraints were given, restate them — they're what the seats judge against.

2. Seat the council. Always seat the five standing seats. Add bench seats the change clearly warrants (a hot-path change → seat Performance; a schema migration → seat Data & Migration). State who you seated and who you benched, and why. A seat with nothing relevant to say should abstain (see step 4), not pad the record.

3. Take each seat's independent position — before any cross-talk. Independence prevents groupthink. Each seat declares:

   • a stance: 🟢 Support · 🟡 Support with conditions · 🔴 Oppose · ⚪ Abstain (out of my lane)
   • 1–3 concrete points tied to the actual artifact (a file:line, a named assumption, a specific interface) — never a generic platitude. Keep each seat tight. A seat is not writing a report; it's staking a position with evidence.

4. Surface the cruxes — this is the most important step. A crux is a specific point where seats genuinely disagree, and the disagreement turns on a real tradeoff or an unresolved fact. For each crux, write:

   • the split: who's on each side (e.g. "Operator 🔴 vs Pragmatist 🟢")
   • what it turns on: the actual tradeoff ("durability vs delivery speed") or the missing fact ("we don't know the p99 write volume")
   • what would resolve it: the data, constraint, or decision that breaks the tie.

   Do not manufacture cruxes. If the council substantively agrees, say so plainly and move on — fabricated conflict is the #1 failure of this skill. Real councils often converge; the honest output is sometimes "unanimous, here's why."

5. Chair's verdict. The Chair decides — names the tradeoff being chosen and what it trades away. Pick one:

   Verdict	Meaning
   ✅ PROCEED	The council backs it. Minor notes may remain.
   ⚠️ PROCEED WITH CONDITIONS	Backed if the listed conditions are met before merge/commit.
   🔁 REVISE	Right direction, but named points must be reworked and re-reviewed.
   ⛔ RECONSIDER	A blocking problem, or it solves the wrong problem. Don't proceed as-is.
   🧭 SPLIT	Genuine deadlock. Rare. The Chair still states a lean and the single question that would settle it.

   The verdict must: (a) name the tradeoff chosen, (b) record dissents — the strongest minority point, preserved not erased, and (c) state "what would change our mind" so the decision is revisitable.

6. Output — use templates/council-review.md. Lead with the verdict; readers want the decision first, the deliberation second.

Quality bar

• Real disagreement, or honest consensus — never theater. Manufactured conflict between personas is the cardinal sin. If they agree, say "unanimous" and give the one reason; spend the words on the cruxes that are real.
• Every seat point is concrete and attached to evidence. file:line for code, the named assumption for a decision. ❌ "Security has concerns." ✅ "Security 🔴: exec(\tar ${path}`)at jobs/export.ts:28 —path` is user-controlled; command injection."
• Stances are explicit and scannable. The reader sees the split (🟢/🟡/🔴/⚪) at a glance, before reading a word of argument.
• Seats stay in their lane. The Pragmatist doesn't relitigate the threat model; Security doesn't lecture on naming. Overlap means the roster is wrong — cut or merge.
• The Chair decides, doesn't average. ❌ "There are good points on both sides." ✅ "PROCEED WITH CONDITIONS — we accept the added operational load (Operator's dissent noted) because the security gain is load-bearing; revisit if on-call pages exceed X."
• Dissent is preserved. The minority seat's strongest point survives into the verdict. A council that erases dissent is just one opinion wearing five hats.
• Falsifiable verdict. "What would change our mind" is mandatory — it turns a verdict into a decision the team can revisit when facts change.

When to use this skill

• ✅ A consequential decision with real tradeoffs (architecture, build-vs-buy, rewrite-vs-refactor, adopt-this-tool)
• ✅ A risky or load-bearing change before merge, where one reviewer's lens isn't enough
• ✅ An RFC / design doc that needs multi-disciplinary scrutiny (security + ops + maintainability at once)
• ✅ A pre-mortem: "assume this shipped and broke — which seat saw it coming?"

When NOT to use this skill

• ❌ A trivial or one-line change — convening five voices is noise. Use devils-advocate or just review it.
• ❌ A single-lens task. Pure code review → devils-advocate. Pure doc review → doc-critique. Scoring named options on weighted criteria → tech-comparison-matrix.
• ❌ When you need one expert answer fast, not a deliberation. The council is for when the disagreement is the point.
• ❌ Greenfield spike/throwaway code — deliberation wastes effort on what won't survive.
• ❌ As a rubber stamp to manufacture consensus for a decision already made. If the call is final, don't stage a fake trial.

Anti-patterns to avoid

• ❌ Manufactured conflict. Inventing a 🔴 so the council "looks balanced." If everyone supports it, that's the finding.
• ❌ Persona cosplay. Flowery in-character roleplay ("As a battle-scarred SRE, I muse...") over substance. The persona is a lens, not a costume.
• ❌ Groupthink. Seats echoing each other. Take positions independently (step 3) before cross-talk.
• ❌ A Chair that punts. "It depends / both have merit" is not a verdict. Decide, name the tradeoff, record the dissent.
• ❌ Overlapping seats. Two seats flagging the same issue means the roster is redundant — that's a smell, not thoroughness.
• ❌ Inflated roster. Seating eight voices on a small change. Seat what's relevant; bench the rest explicitly.
• ❌ Reviewing out of scope. The council deliberates the decision/change in front of it, not the whole codebase's debt.
• ❌ Burying the verdict. Leading with the deliberation transcript instead of the decision. Verdict first.