| name | council |
|---|---|
| description | Convene a 5-member advisor council that pressure-tests any decision, plan, or idea. Five sharp personas answer independently, blind-review each other, and a chairman delivers the verdict plus next steps — real pushback instead of a yes-man. Triggers on "/council", "convene the council", "pressure-test this", "stress-test my plan", "poke holes in this idea", "what am I missing". |
Based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM Council (github.com/karpathy/llm-council, 22.9k★). Karpathy's version sends one question to several different model providers, has them blind-review each other, then a chairman synthesizes. This skill runs the same idea entirely on Claude Code subagents — no OpenRouter, no extra API keys — and swaps the "different providers" for five sharp advisor personas so you get real disagreement, not five copies of the same answer.
LLMs are sycophants. A 2025 study published in Science (arXiv 2510.01395), across 11 state-of-the-art models, found they affirm the user ~50% more than humans do — endorsing bad ideas, and even manipulation and deception, to keep you happy. On r/AmITheAsshole prompts, models sided with the user in 51% of cases where the human consensus was that they were wrong.
A single Claude answer is a yes-man. A council that argues, reviews blind, and is forced to commit is not.
Any real decision, plan, strategy, offer, launch, architecture call, or "should I do X" — anywhere a single agreeable answer would be dangerous. Trigger on /council <your decision or idea> or the phrases in the description.
Take the user's idea/decision verbatim. If the decision or the definition of success is unclear, ask one clarifying question, then proceed. Never run the council on a vague prompt — garbage in, five confident wrong answers out.
Spawn five subagents in parallel (one message, five Task calls). Each receives only the user's question and its own role — never the others' answers. Each returns: its position (go / no-go / modify), the three strongest points through its lens, and the single biggest risk it sees.
The five seats:
- The Contrarian — assumes it fails. Hunts only for the failure modes and the reason this dies. No upside allowed.
- The First-Principles Thinker — ignores "how it's normally done." Rebuilds from base truths and attacks every unstated assumption.
- The Expansionist — finds the 10× version you're too timid to see. What's the biggest, most ambitious shape of this?
- The Outsider — knows nothing about this industry. Asks the naive questions that expose what insiders assume without noticing.
- The Executor — doesn't care about theory. Only: what do you do Monday morning? Turns it into a concrete first action, or kills it as un-actionable.
Give each advisor the other four verdicts, anonymized (Advisor A/B/C/D — never who wrote what, so nobody plays favorites). Each ranks the arguments by strength and flags the one it thinks is most wrong. This anonymized cross-review is Karpathy's stage 2 and is what actually breaks the echo chamber.
Spawn one final subagent, the Chairman. It receives all five verdicts plus the peer rankings. It does not average and does not people-please. It returns:
- The call, one line: GO / NO-GO / MODIFY.
- Three reasons that survived scrutiny.
- One risk that must be handled.
- Three concrete next actions — what to do Monday.
Lead with the Chairman's verdict — that's the answer. Then, only if the council genuinely split, a short "the council was divided on X" note. Keep individual-advisor detail brief or collapsible. The verdict is the product, not the transcript.
- No drift into agreement. If all five advisors agree, the Contrarian failed its job — re-run it harder before the review stage.
- Anonymize the peer review. Non-negotiable. Named reviews reintroduce the yes-man effect this skill exists to kill.
- The Chairman commits. "It depends" is a failure. Force a call plus the one condition that would flip it.
- Keep the output tight. Verdict + 3 reasons + 1 risk + 3 actions. No wall of text — the point is a decision, not an essay.