council

What this skill does

When applied, it prepends a system prompt before your request is sent — no extra calls and no change to how you are billed beyond the added tokens.

---
name: council
description: Convene a four-voice council for ambiguous decisions, tradeoffs, and go/no-go calls. Use when multiple valid paths exist and you need structured disagreement before choosing.
origin: ECC
---

# Council

Convene four advisors for ambiguous decisions:
- the in-context Claude voice
- a Skeptic subagent
- a Pragmatist subagent
- a Critic subagent

This is for **decision-making under ambiguity**, not code review, implementation planning, or architecture design.

## When to Use

Use council when:
- a decision has multiple credible paths and no obvious winner
- you need explicit tradeoff surfacing
- the user asks for second opinions, dissent, or multiple perspectives
- conversational anchoring is a real risk
- a go / no-go call would benefit from adversarial challenge

Examples:
- monorepo vs polyrepo
- ship now vs hold for polish
- feature flag vs full rollout
- simplify scope vs keep strategic breadth

## When NOT to Use

| Instead of council | Use |
| --- | --- |
| Verifying whether output is correct | `santa-method` |
| Breaking a feature into implementation steps | `planner` |
| Designing system architecture | `architect` |
| Reviewing code for bugs or security | `code-reviewer` or `santa-method` |
| Straight factual questions | just answer directly |
| Obvious execution tasks | just do the task |

## Roles

| Voice | Lens |
| --- | --- |
| Architect | correctness, maintainability, long-term implications |
| Skeptic | premise challenge, simplification, assumption breaking |
| Pragmatist | shipping speed, user impact, operational reality |
| Critic | edge cases, downside risk, failure modes |

The three external voices should be launched as fresh subagents with **only the question and relevant context**, not the full ongoing conversation. That is the anti-anchoring mechanism.

## Workflow

### 1. Extract the real question

Reduce the decision to one explicit prompt:
- what are we deciding?
- what constraints matter?
- what counts as succe

Use this skill

{
  "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
  "skill": "imp-75f4659b-819a-4f46-a3ff-f103f52acd1d",
  "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "…" }]
}

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