council

The council skill is designed to support decision-making under ambiguity by convening a structured four-voice advisory process. It helps users evaluate complex choices where multiple credible options exist and no obvious answer is available. Instead of producing a single immediate recommendation, the skill creates deliberate disagreement and adversarial analysis before reaching a conclusion. Its primary purpose is to reduce conversational anchoring, expose hidden tradeoffs, and improve confidence in strategic decisions such as go/no-go calls, rollout strategies, or scope prioritization.

The skill operates through four distinct perspectives: Architect, Skeptic, Pragmatist, and Critic. Each voice evaluates the same decision question through a different lens, including long-term maintainability, assumption testing, execution speed, and downside risk. The workflow includes extracting the real question, gathering only relevant context, forming an initial position independently, launching isolated subagent perspectives in parallel, and synthesizing the results with explicit bias guardrails. The process emphasizes compact context sharing, structured reasoning, visible dissent, and transparent synthesis rather than consensus-driven discussion.

This skill is intended for product leaders, technical decision-makers, strategists, engineering managers, and teams facing uncertain tradeoffs. Typical use cases include choosing between architectural approaches, deciding whether to ship or delay a feature, evaluating rollout strategies, or testing assumptions in high-impact planning discussions. It is not intended for implementation planning, code review, factual Q&A, or system architecture design, and should instead be used when structured disagreement and multi-perspective reasoning are valuable.