council-of-high-intelligence README

The project's README from github.com/0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence. As one markdown file: README.md.

Council of High Intelligence

Council of High Intelligence

Structured multi-perspective deliberation for decisions that deserve more than one reasoning path.

Lint Release License

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.

Decision field notes

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

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 mode selector

/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.

Verdict blueprint

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:

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.

Council outcome ledger

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.

Council panel composition

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.

Council provider routing

Provider path Detection
Native host subagents Available through the active supported client
OpenAI codex executable
Google 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.

Council of High Intelligence star history

License

MIT © 2026 0xNyk

council-of-high-intelligence (0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence)

decision-making
Searching Database…

4.7K ·GitHub
Council-of-high-intelligence
What is this?Council of High Intelligence runs structured multi-perspective deliberation on hard decisions by assigning a question to 18 distinct analytical personas (Aristotle, Socrates, Feynman, Linus Torvalds and others), forcing independent first positions, cross-examination, and a final verdict that preserves unresolved questions, dissent, kill criteria, and a concrete next step.
Is this a standalone app or something added to an existing AI coding assistant?It is a skill/plugin that hooks into existing AI agent CLIs, not a standalone app. You install it into Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, or OpenCode and trigger it with the same slash command inside that host.
How do I install it and run my first council?Claude Code users install the plugin directly and then run /council, --quick, or --duo. For Codex, Gemini CLI, or OpenCode, clone the repository once and run ./install.sh with the matching flag (--claude-dir, --codex-dir, --gemini-dir, --opencode-dir), then restart the client.
Which coding agents does it actually work with?It supports Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and OpenCode as hosts, and can additionally route seats to OpenAI, Google, Ollama, NVIDIA NIM, or Cursor if their executables or API keys are detected on your machine.
When should I skip convening a council?Skip it for plain factual lookups (use direct documentation instead), for cheap reversible choices (just run the experiment), and never use it to manufacture support for a decision already made; also remember to restart your client after installing, since the command will not appear until you do.
What are the 18 personas in the council?Members include Aristotle, Socrates, Sun Tzu, Ada Lovelace, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, Lao Tzu, Feynman, Linus Torvalds, Musashi, Alan Watts, Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, Kahneman, Donella Meadows, Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, and Dieter Rams, each paired with a counterweight lens to force genuine disagreement.
What's the difference between Full, Quick, and Duo modes?Full runs independent analysis, cross-examination, final stance, and synthesis for high-stakes decisions; Quick restates the problem and gives rapid analysis plus final positions when breadth matters more than a full adversarial round; Duo is a two-member dialectic for decisions defined by one polarity.
Does it check whether a verdict actually held up later?Before acting on a recommendation you record the prediction, owner, review date, and the evidence that would change it; at the checkpoint the outcome gets marked confirmed, revised, reversed, or inconclusive instead of rewriting the original reasoning.
Can I run a smaller panel instead of all 18 members?Yes, named triads pull three relevant lenses from domains like architecture, strategy, ethics, debugging, risk, or ai-safety, and custom panels can be built with --members using the routing table in SKILL.md.
What are similar projects?open-steps, pstack-claude, fable-orchestrator, Agentlas-OS, claude-octopus, foreman, Intent-Router, ordewell
Which topics is it in?llm-routing, decision-making, llm-agent, decision-model, claude-code-skills, reasoning, multi-agent-systems, gemini-cli, agent-skill, opencode, orchestration, agent-orchestration
Creator
0xNyk
Size
5.8 MB
Stars
4.7K
Updated
CommitOct 12Releasev1.2.0Jul 04
Age
7mo
Commits · 90 Days