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. Gate it first: if you can't name what the wrong choice costs to reverse, don't seat the council — decide directly and move on. A panel costs 4–6 opus subagents; spend that only where being wrong is expensive to undo. ## Frame and seat the council Restate the decision, the real options, and the binding constraints. If one missing fact would flip the answer, ask it (max 1–2 questions) — otherwise proceed on stated assumptions. Then spawn the advisors with the Agent tool, all in one message, so they run in parallel. Each returns: **position · core reasoning · biggest risk they see · confidence (low/med/high)**. On `deep`, once all seats report, show each advisor the others' positions (unattributed) and have them name the single strongest opposing point. ## The seats (mandate + forbidden move = real divergence) - **Pragmatic Executor** — what ships fastest and safest with current resources. *Forbidden:* greenfield / ideal-world answers. - **First-Principles** — reason up from fundamentals and constraints. *Forbidden:* citing "best prac...