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 --quick when cross-examination will not change the outcome.
• Use --duo when 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
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.

Project links

• Release history
• Brand kit
• OSS profile
• Sponsor ongoing maintenance
• Maintainer: Nyk · @nykdotdev
• Issues

License

MIT © 2026 0xNyk