Council of High Intelligence
Structured multi-perspective deliberation for decisions that deserve more than one reasoning path.
Claude Code · Codex · Gemini CLI · OpenCode
The council assigns a hard question to deliberately different analytical personas, keeps their first positions independent, forces direct disagreement, and returns a verdict that preserves unresolved questions, dissent, kill criteria, and the next concrete action.
Try a council
Claude Code users can install the plugin directly:
/plugin marketplace add 0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence
/plugin install council@council-of-high-intelligence
Then convene the full council, a faster panel, or a two-member dialectic:
/council Should we open-source our agent framework?
/council --quick Should we add caching here?
/council --duo Should we use microservices or a monolith?
For Codex, Gemini CLI, or OpenCode, clone once and use the matching installer flag:
git clone https://github.com/0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence.git
cd council-of-high-intelligence
./install.sh --codex-only
./install.sh --gemini-only
./install.sh --opencode-only
Restart the target client after installation. The command remains /council on every
supported host.
Use it for the decision boundary
Good council questions have material downside, competing values, incomplete evidence, or an irreversible choice. Write down the decision, constraints, evidence, reversibility, and deadline before adding personas.
The field notes distinguish facts from inference, assumptions, and unknowns. They also make it harder to use a long deliberation as decoration for a decision already made.
When to use something smaller
- Use a direct answer or primary documentation for factual lookups.
- Run an experiment when the choice is cheap and reversible.
- Use
--quickwhen cross-examination will not change the outcome. - Use
--duowhen one tension matters more than broad coverage. - Do not convene a council to manufacture support for a preferred answer.
Choose a mode
| Mode | Shape | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Full | Independent analysis, cross-examination, final stance, synthesis | Stakes are high and competing frames need contact |
| Quick | Restate, rapid analysis, final positions | The decision needs breadth but not a full adversarial round |
| Duo | Opening positions, direct response, final statements | One polarity defines the decision |
/council --full What is the right pricing model?
/council --quick --triad shipping Should we release today?
/council --duo --members torvalds,ada Is this abstraction worth it?
Named triads select three relevant lenses without assembling the whole council:
/council --triad strategy Where is our defensible advantage?
/council --triad risk What could make this launch irreversible?
/council --triad ai-product Which capability belongs in the product?
Available domains include architecture, strategy, ethics, debugging, risk,
shipping, product, founder, ai, ai-product, ai-safety, decision, systems,
uncertainty, design, economics, and bias. The canonical routing table lives in
SKILL.md.
What the protocol protects
The full protocol has a fixed round budget. Members first restate the problem, analyze blind, cross-examine other positions, declare a final stance, and then enter synthesis. Enforcement checks look for premature agreement, repeated claims, missing dissent, and unsupported confidence.
Verdicts lead with what remains unresolved. A recommendation is paired with acceptable compromises, kill criteria, and one concrete next step. When the weighted tally remains split, the result returns that split to the user instead of turning it into prose consensus.
Evidence labels separate:
FACT: directly supported by supplied or retrieved evidence;INFERENCE: follows from evidence but is not directly observed;ASSUMPTION: required for the argument and still unverified;UNKNOWN: missing information that could change the decision.
Track the outcome
A verdict is useful only if it can be checked later. Before acting, record the prediction, owner, review date, and evidence that would change the recommendation. At the checkpoint, mark the result confirmed, revised, reversed, or inconclusive instead of rewriting the original rationale.
The 18 lenses
Members are analytical instruments, not impersonation claims. Each persona has a grounding protocol, a method, known blind spots, and a structured response contract.
| Member | Primary lens | Useful counterweight |
|---|---|---|
| Aristotle | Categories and structure | Lao Tzu on emergence and excess structure |
| Socrates | Assumption destruction | Feynman on reconstruction from first principles |
| Sun Tzu | Terrain and adversarial strategy | Aurelius on internal control and moral cost |
| Ada Lovelace | Formal systems and abstraction | Machiavelli on incentives and informal power |
| Marcus Aurelius | Resilience and moral clarity | Sun Tzu on external competition |
| Machiavelli | Power and incentives | Ada on formal consistency |
| Lao Tzu | Non-action and emergence | Aristotle on explicit categories |
| Richard Feynman | Explanation and empirical debugging | Socrates on the premise itself |
| Linus Torvalds | Shipping and maintainability | Meadows on system-level consequences |
| Miyamoto Musashi | Timing and decisive action | Torvalds on acting before the ideal moment |
| Alan Watts | Reframing and false problems | Torvalds on concrete implementation |
| Andrej Karpathy | Empirical ML behavior | Sutskever on frontier risk |
| Ilya Sutskever | Scaling and AI safety | Karpathy on observation and iteration |
| Daniel Kahneman | Cognitive bias | Feynman on explicit causal reasoning |
| Donella Meadows | Feedback loops and high-impact interventions | Torvalds on local fixes |
| Charlie Munger | Inversion and model lattices | Aristotle on single-system classification |
| Nassim Taleb | Tail risk and fragility | Karpathy on smooth empirical trends |
| Dieter Rams | User clarity and restraint | Ada on what can be formalized |
The repository stores each member contract under agents/. Custom panels can
use --members, named triads, or the classic, exploration-orthogonal, and
execution-lean profiles documented in SKILL.md.
Multi-provider routing
The detection script checks which supported providers are available, then the coordinator distributes seats across them. Polarity pairs are separated when possible so a single model family does not play both sides of a disagreement.
| Provider path | Detection |
|---|---|
| Native host subagents | Available through the active supported client |
| OpenAI | codex executable |
gemini executable | |
| Ollama | ollama executable |
| NVIDIA NIM | NVIDIA_API_KEY |
| Cursor | cursor-agent executable or configured login |
Preview routing without running a council:
/council --dry-route --triad decision Should we accept this acquisition offer?
Use --no-auto-route to keep native-host defaults. Use --models <path> with a copy of
configs/provider-model-slots.example.yaml
for an explicit seat map. Provider failure is reported before the seat falls back to the
native host.
Installation reference
./install.sh # Claude Code
./install.sh --codex # Claude Code + Codex
./install.sh --codex-only # Codex only
./install.sh --gemini # Claude Code + Gemini CLI
./install.sh --gemini-only # Gemini CLI only
./install.sh --opencode # Claude Code + OpenCode
./install.sh --opencode-only # OpenCode only
./install.sh --copy-configs # Include provider-routing templates
./install.sh --dry-run # Preview writes
Custom target directories are supported through --claude-dir, --codex-dir,
--gemini-dir, and --opencode-dir. Run ./install.sh --help for the current contract.
Verify the checkout
./scripts/council-simulation-checklist.sh
./install.sh --dry-run --codex
./install.sh --dry-run --gemini
./install.sh --dry-run --opencode
The checklist validates persona structure, host-protocol parity, routing configuration, execution checkpoints, verdict fields, and installer behavior. Use the demo session pack to exercise full, quick, and duo modes.
Repository map
SKILL.md canonical coordinator protocol
SKILL.codex.md Codex host mirror
SKILL.gemini.md Gemini CLI host mirror
SKILL.opencode.md OpenCode host mirror
agents/ 18 grounded persona contracts
configs/ provider and model-routing examples
demos/ sample sessions and verdict template
scripts/ detection, conversion, and validation tools
assets/ brand system and README visuals
install.sh multi-host installer
Protocol changes start in SKILL.md and must remain behaviorally aligned with each host
mirror. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the required checks and review contract.
Security reports belong in SECURITY.md, not a public issue.
Project links
- Release history
- Brand kit
- OSS profile
- Sponsor ongoing maintenance
- Maintainer: Nyk · @nykdotdev
- Issues
