18 AI personas deliberate your hardest decisions across multiple LLM providers. One command.
Table of Contents
git clone https://github.com/0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence.git
cd council-of-high-intelligence
./install.shThen in Claude Code:
/council Should we open-source our agent framework?
/council --quick Should we add caching here?
/council --duo Should we use microservices or monolith?
git clone https://github.com/0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence.git
cd council-of-high-intelligence
./install.sh --codexThen in Codex:
/council Should we open-source our agent framework?
/council --quick Should we add caching here?
/council --duo Should we use microservices or monolith?
A single LLM gives you one reasoning path dressed up as confidence. Ask it a hard question and you get a fluent, structured, wrong answer. The council gives you structured disagreement instead:
- Get genuinely different perspectives — polarity pairs force real tension (Socrates destroys assumptions; Feynman rebuilds from first principles). Multi-provider routing spreads members across Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama so you get actually different reasoning, not costume changes on one model
- Catch wrong questions early — the Problem Restate Gate makes every member reframe the question before analysis begins. If 3 members restate your question differently, the question was the problem
- Know what the council can't answer — verdicts lead with Unresolved Questions and Recommended Next Steps, not with confident-sounding consensus. What the council doesn't know matters more than where it agrees
- Prevent groupthink — dissent quotas, novelty gates, and counterfactual prompts enforce genuine disagreement. If >70% agree too early, two members are forced to steelman the opposing view
Why not just ask Claude directly? A single prompt gives you one model's confident best guess. The council gives you 3-18 independent analyses from different intellectual traditions, forces them to challenge each other's claims, and synthesizes a verdict that surfaces disagreement rather than hiding it. It's the difference between asking one advisor and convening a board.
| Agent | Figure | Domain | Default Model | Polarity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
council-aristotle |
Aristotle | Categorization & structure | opus | Classifies everything |
council-socrates |
Socrates | Assumption destruction | opus | Questions everything |
council-sun-tzu |
Sun Tzu | Adversarial strategy | sonnet | Reads terrain & competition |
council-ada |
Ada Lovelace | Formal systems & abstraction | sonnet | What can/can't be mechanized |
council-aurelius |
Marcus Aurelius | Resilience & moral clarity | opus | Control vs acceptance |
council-machiavelli |
Machiavelli | Power dynamics & realpolitik | sonnet | How actors actually behave |
council-lao-tzu |
Lao Tzu | Non-action & emergence | opus | When less is more |
council-feynman |
Feynman | First-principles debugging | sonnet | Refuses unexplained complexity |
council-torvalds |
Linus Torvalds | Pragmatic engineering | sonnet | Ship it or shut up |
council-musashi |
Miyamoto Musashi | Strategic timing | sonnet | The decisive strike |
council-watts |
Alan Watts | Perspective & reframing | opus | Dissolves false problems |
council-karpathy |
Andrej Karpathy | Neural network intuition | sonnet | How models actually learn and fail |
council-sutskever |
Ilya Sutskever | Scaling frontier & AI safety | opus | When capability becomes risk |
council-kahneman |
Daniel Kahneman | Cognitive bias & decision science | opus | Your own thinking is the first error |
council-meadows |
Donella Meadows | Systems thinking & feedback loops | sonnet | Redesign the system, not the symptom |
council-munger |
Charlie Munger | Multi-model reasoning & economics | sonnet | Invert — what guarantees failure? |
council-taleb |
Nassim Taleb | Antifragility & tail risk | opus | Design for the tail, not the average |
council-rams |
Dieter Rams | User-centered design | sonnet | Less, but better — the user decides |
Polarity Pairs — members are chosen as deliberate counterweights
- Socrates vs Feynman — Destroys top-down vs rebuilds bottom-up
- Aristotle vs Lao Tzu — Classifies everything vs structure IS the problem
- Sun Tzu vs Aurelius — Wins external games vs governs the internal one
- Ada vs Machiavelli — Formal purity vs messy human incentives
- Torvalds vs Watts — Ships concrete solutions vs questions whether the problem exists
- Musashi vs Torvalds — Waits for the perfect moment vs ships it now
- Karpathy vs Sutskever — Build it, observe it, iterate vs pause, research, ensure safety first
- Karpathy vs Ada — Empirical ML intuition vs formal systems theory
- Kahneman vs Feynman — Your cognition is the first error vs trust first-principles reasoning
- Meadows vs Torvalds — Redesign the feedback loop vs fix the symptom and ship
- Munger vs Aristotle — Multi-model lattice vs single taxonomic system
- Taleb vs Karpathy — Hidden catastrophic tails vs smooth empirical scaling curves
- Rams vs Ada — What the user needs vs what computation can do
3-round structured deliberation: independent analysis → cross-examination → final positions.
/council Should we open-source our agent framework?
/council --triad strategy What's our competitive moat?
/council --full What is the right pricing model?
2-round rapid analysis for simpler decisions. No cross-examination.
/council --quick Should we add caching here?
/council --quick --triad shipping Should we release today?
2-member dialectic using polarity pairs. Great for exploring tensions.
/council --duo Should we use microservices or monolith?
/council --duo --members torvalds,ada Is this abstraction worth it?
Pre-defined Triads — 20 domain-specific 3-member combinations
| Domain | Triad | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
architecture |
Aristotle + Ada + Feynman | Classify + formalize + simplicity-test |
strategy |
Sun Tzu + Machiavelli + Aurelius | Terrain + incentives + moral grounding |
ethics |
Aurelius + Socrates + Lao Tzu | Duty + questioning + natural order |
debugging |
Feynman + Socrates + Ada | Bottom-up + assumption testing + formal verification |
innovation |
Ada + Lao Tzu + Aristotle | Abstraction + emergence + classification |
conflict |
Socrates + Machiavelli + Aurelius | Expose + predict + ground |
complexity |
Lao Tzu + Aristotle + Ada | Emergence + categories + formalism |
risk |
Sun Tzu + Aurelius + Feynman | Threats + resilience + empirical verification |
shipping |
Torvalds + Musashi + Feynman | Pragmatism + timing + first-principles |
product |
Torvalds + Machiavelli + Watts | Ship it + incentives + reframing |
founder |
Musashi + Sun Tzu + Torvalds | Timing + terrain + engineering reality |
ai |
Karpathy + Sutskever + Ada | Empirical ML + scaling frontier + formal limits |
ai-product |
Karpathy + Torvalds + Machiavelli | ML capability + shipping pragmatism + incentives |
ai-safety |
Sutskever + Aurelius + Socrates | Safety frontier + moral clarity + assumption destruction |
decision |
Kahneman + Munger + Aurelius | Bias detection + inversion + moral clarity |
systems |
Meadows + Lao Tzu + Aristotle | Feedback loops + emergence + categories |
uncertainty |
Taleb + Sun Tzu + Sutskever | Tail risk + terrain + scaling frontier |
design |
Rams + Torvalds + Watts | User clarity + maintainability + reframing |
economics |
Munger + Machiavelli + Sun Tzu | Models + incentives + competition |
bias |
Kahneman + Socrates + Watts | Cognitive bias + assumption destruction + frame audit |
Council Profiles — pre-built panels for different needs
All 18 members with domain triads above. Best for broad deliberation.
12-member panel for discovery and "unknown unknowns" reduction:
- Socrates, Feynman, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Ada, Lao Tzu, Aurelius, Torvalds, Karpathy, Sutskever, Kahneman, Meadows
- Profile triads:
unknowns,market-entry,system-design,reframing,ai-frontier,blind-spots
5-member panel for fast decision-to-action:
- Torvalds, Feynman, Sun Tzu, Aurelius, Ada
- Profile triads:
ship-now,launch-strategy,stability
The council automatically detects installed LLM providers and distributes members across them for genuine model diversity — zero config required.
/council --triad decision Should we accept this acquisition offer?
Supported providers (auto-detected):
| Provider | CLI | Exec Method |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic (Claude) | native | subagent (always available) |
| OpenAI | codex |
codex exec |
gemini |
gemini -p |
|
| Ollama (local) | ollama |
ollama run |
| NVIDIA NIM | NVIDIA_API_KEY env |
openai_compatible_api |
NVIDIA NIM (build.nvidia.com) exposes 130+ open-weight models (DeepSeek, Kimi, MiniMax, GLM, Qwen, Nemotron) via an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Free tier: 1,000 credits, 40 RPM. Detection requires only export NVIDIA_API_KEY=nvapi-... — no CLI binary needed. See configs/provider-model-slots.nim.example.yaml for a sample seat allocation.
How routing works:
- Polarity pairs are separated across providers (hard constraint)
- Members spread evenly across available providers
- Per-member
provider_affinityin frontmatter used as tiebreaker - If any provider fails, automatic fallback to Claude
Flags:
--no-auto-route— disable auto-routing, use Claude-only defaults--dry-route— print the routing table without running the council--models [path]— manual override with YAML config (seeconfigs/provider-model-slots.example.yaml)
Full mode runs 7 steps: provider routing → problem restate gate → independent analysis → cross-examination → enforcement scan → final positions → verdict synthesis. Verdicts lead with what the council doesn't know.
Full protocol details
- Provider Detection & Routing — auto-detect providers, assign members
- Problem Restate Gate — each member restates the problem + provides an alternative framing before analysis begins
- Round 1: Independent Analysis (blind-first) — all members analyze in parallel (400 words max)
- Round 2: Cross-Examination — members challenge each other (300 words, must engage 2+ others)
- Post-Round Enforcement — dissent quota, novelty gate, agreement check, anti-recursion (single pass)
- Round 3: Final Crystallization — 100-word position statements
- Verdict Synthesis — leads with Unresolved Questions and Recommended Next Steps
- Problem Restate + Rapid Analysis — reframe + analyze in parallel (200 words max)
- Final Positions — 75-word crystallization
- Problem Restate + Opening Positions — reframe + state positions (300 words)
- Direct Response — engage opponent's claims (200 words)
- Final Statements — 50-word positions
- Anti-recursion prevents Socrates from infinite questioning
- Dissent quota + novelty gate + counterfactual pass prevent premature convergence
- Tie-breaking uses 2/3 majority with domain expert weighting
- All verdicts include a Follow-Up section for outcome tracking
Installs 18 council agents plus skill files for Claude and/or Codex.
./install.sh # Claude install (default)
./install.sh --codex # Claude + Codex skill install
./install.sh --codex-only # Codex-only install
./install.sh --claude-dir /path/to/.claude # Non-default Claude config directory
./install.sh --codex-dir /path/to/.codex # Non-default Codex config directory
./install.sh --dry-run # Preview without writing
./install.sh --copy-configs # Also install model routing templatesRestart your target client(s) after installing. Run ./scripts/council-simulation-checklist.sh to validate. Try the demo session pack to test all modes.
- Claude Code CLI (required for Claude usage)
- Codex (required for Codex skill usage)
- Agent/subagent support in your client (enabled by default)
Optional providers (auto-detected for multi-provider routing):
- Codex CLI (OpenAI) —
npm i -g @openai/codex - Gemini CLI (Google) — see gemini-cli repo
- Ollama (local models) — install from ollama.com
Contributions welcome. Read the contribution guidelines first.
If you find this project useful, consider supporting my open-source work.
Solana donations
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To the extent possible under law, the authors have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.