ask-the-council

# Ask the Council A panel of advisors who are required to disagree, then a Chairman who decides. Use for decisions and tradeoffs, not for gathering facts. ## Proactive use If a decision is high-stakes and the options genuinely compete — architecture choice, buy-vs-build, irreversible migration — invoke this without being asked: announce in one line ("Convening the council: <decision>") and proceed. Never ask permission to run the skill. ## Process 1. **Frame the decision.** Restate the question, the real options, and the binding constraints. If one missing fact would flip the answer, ask it (max 1–2). Otherwise proceed on stated assumptions. 2. **Seat the council — in parallel.** Spawn advisors with the Agent tool, **all in one message**. Default panel of 4; `deep` seats all 6 and adds a critique round. Each advisor returns: **position · core reasoning · biggest risk they see · confidence (low/med/high)**. 3. **(deep only) Cross-critique.** Show each advisor the others' positions (unattributed) and have them name the single strongest opposing point. 4. **Chairman synthesis (you).** Not an average — a judgment. Output where they converge, where they split and *why*, the decisive tradeoff, and **one recommended path** with its rationale and the main risk to watch. ## The seats (mandate + forbidden move = real divergence) - **Pragmatic Executor** — what ships fastest and safest with current resources. *Forbidden:* greenfield / ideal-world answers...