council

Convene a four-voice council that assigns Architect, Skeptic, Pragmatist, and Critic roles to independent voices. Each responds with a position, reasoning, risk, and one surprise, which are then synthesized into a verdict showing consensus and dissent.

Launch external advisor voices as fresh subagents that receive only the decision question and compact context, not the full conversation history. Write down your own initial position before reading their responses so the synthesis does not simply mirror them.

Use a council for ambiguous decisions with multiple credible paths, such as rollout strategy or scope tradeoffs. For verifying correctness, reviewing code for bugs, or planning implementation steps, use verification, code review, or planning approaches instead.

The default is one round. For follow-up rounds, keep the new question focused, include the previous verdict only if necessary, and keep the Skeptic voice as clean as possible to preserve its anti-anchoring value.

A council is not suited for factual questions, obvious execution tasks, architecture design, or code review. Its value is making disagreement legible before choosing, not producing unanimity or verifying output correctness.