{"slug": "the-council-skill-convene-a-5-advisor-council-that-pressure-tests-any-decision-a", "title": "The /council Skill — convene a 5-advisor council that pressure-tests any decision, blind-reviews, and delivers a verdict (Andrej Karpathy's LLM Council, anti-yes-man, runs on Claude Code subagents)", "summary": "A developer created a /council skill for Claude Code that convenes a five-advisor council to pressure-test decisions, plans, or ideas. Based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM Council, the skill uses five subagents with distinct personas—Contrarian, First-Principles Thinker, Expansionist, Outsider, and Executor—to provide blind peer review and a chairman's verdict, countering the sycophancy bias found in LLMs.", "body_md": "| name | council |\n|---|---|\n| description | Convene a 5-member advisor council that pressure-tests any decision, plan, or idea. Five sharp personas answer independently, blind-review each other, and a chairman delivers the verdict plus next steps — real pushback instead of a yes-man. Triggers on \"/council\", \"convene the council\", \"pressure-test this\", \"stress-test my plan\", \"poke holes in this idea\", \"what am I missing\". |\n\nBased on Andrej Karpathy's **LLM Council** (github.com/karpathy/llm-council, 22.9k★). Karpathy's version sends one question to several different model providers, has them **blind-review each other**, then a **chairman** synthesizes. This skill runs the same idea entirely on Claude Code subagents — no OpenRouter, no extra API keys — and swaps the \"different providers\" for **five sharp advisor personas** so you get real disagreement, not five copies of the same answer.\n\nLLMs are sycophants. A 2025 study published in *Science* (arXiv 2510.01395), across **11 state-of-the-art models**, found they affirm the user **~50% more than humans do** — endorsing bad ideas, and even manipulation and deception, to keep you happy. On r/AmITheAsshole prompts, models sided with the user in **51%** of cases where the human consensus was that they were wrong.\n\nA single Claude answer is a yes-man. A council that argues, reviews blind, and is forced to commit is not.\n\nAny real decision, plan, strategy, offer, launch, architecture call, or \"should I do X\" — anywhere a single agreeable answer would be dangerous. Trigger on `/council <your decision or idea>`\n\nor the phrases in the description.\n\nTake the user's idea/decision verbatim. If the decision or the definition of success is unclear, ask **one** clarifying question, then proceed. Never run the council on a vague prompt — garbage in, five confident wrong answers out.\n\nSpawn **five subagents in parallel** (one message, five Task calls). Each receives **only** the user's question and its own role — never the others' answers. Each returns: its **position** (go / no-go / modify), the **three strongest points** through its lens, and the **single biggest risk** it sees.\n\nThe five seats:\n\n**The Contrarian**— assumes it fails. Hunts only for the failure modes and the reason this dies. No upside allowed.** The First-Principles Thinker**— ignores \"how it's normally done.\" Rebuilds from base truths and attacks every unstated assumption.** The Expansionist**— finds the 10× version you're too timid to see. What's the biggest, most ambitious shape of this?** The Outsider**— knows nothing about this industry. Asks the naive questions that expose what insiders assume without noticing.** The Executor**— doesn't care about theory. Only: what do you*do*Monday morning? Turns it into a concrete first action, or kills it as un-actionable.\n\nGive each advisor the **other four verdicts, anonymized** (Advisor A/B/C/D — never who wrote what, so nobody plays favorites). Each ranks the arguments by strength and flags the one it thinks is most wrong. This anonymized cross-review is Karpathy's stage 2 and is what actually breaks the echo chamber.\n\nSpawn **one** final subagent, the Chairman. It receives all five verdicts plus the peer rankings. It does **not** average and does **not** people-please. It returns:\n\n**The call**, one line: GO / NO-GO / MODIFY.** Three reasons**that survived scrutiny.** One risk**that must be handled.** Three concrete next actions**— what to do Monday.\n\nLead with the Chairman's verdict — that's the answer. Then, only if the council genuinely split, a short \"the council was divided on X\" note. Keep individual-advisor detail brief or collapsible. The verdict is the product, not the transcript.\n\n**No drift into agreement.** If all five advisors agree, the Contrarian failed its job — re-run it harder before the review stage.**Anonymize the peer review.** Non-negotiable. Named reviews reintroduce the yes-man effect this skill exists to kill.**The Chairman commits.**\"It depends\" is a failure. Force a call plus the one condition that would flip it.** Keep the output tight.**Verdict + 3 reasons + 1 risk + 3 actions. No wall of text — the point is a decision, not an essay.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-council-skill-convene-a-5-advisor-council-that-pressure-tests-any-decision-a", "canonical_source": "https://gist.github.com/conradcaffier03/3c0d0d9c41ed6e0c648a97d6465a9047", "published_at": "2026-07-20 21:25:52+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-26 14:29:15.413935+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-agents", "ai-safety", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Andrej Karpathy", "Claude Code", "LLM Council", "Science"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-council-skill-convene-a-5-advisor-council-that-pressure-tests-any-decision-a", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-council-skill-convene-a-5-advisor-council-that-pressure-tests-any-decision-a.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-council-skill-convene-a-5-advisor-council-that-pressure-tests-any-decision-a.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-council-skill-convene-a-5-advisor-council-that-pressure-tests-any-decision-a.jsonld"}}