council

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

2. Gather only the necessary context

3. Form the Architect position first

4. Launch three independent voices in parallel

5. Synthesize with bias guardrails

6. Present a compact verdict

Council: [short decision title]

Verdict

Persistence Rule