A Claude skill that assembles a panel of real, named experts to pressure-test your decisions.
You describe a high-stakes decision. Council interviews you, selects 3-4 experts whose worldviews clash on your specific problem, simulates each perspective with a killer question, and gives you a directional lean — not a wishy-washy "it depends."
Expert perspectives are AI-simulated based on public statements and known frameworks. They are not endorsements or actual advice from the named individuals.
Companion to CPO. CPO structures the decision (what to build, kill criteria, journal). Council pressure-tests it (who disagrees, why, and what you're not seeing). Use them together or separately.
git clone https://github.com/0x2kNJ/council.git ~/.claude/skills/councilOr download council.skill from releases and install in Claude Code or Cowork.
help me think through whether we should take this acquisition offer —
$800k agency, 2x revenue, my team doesn't know yet
Turn 1 — Council gives you a provisional one-line read, then asks two diagnostic questions. It asks before it advises, because the right question usually matters more than the right answer.
Turn 2 — The panel. Three experts with clashing perspectives, each grounded in your specific situation. A directional lean. A confidence delta that tells you whether the analysis moved your prior or confirmed it.
Reversibility: One-way door — founder identity and team autonomy
can't be reacquired after integration.
Watch for: You've ruled out negotiating. Acquirers expect pushback.
Elad Gil (financial strategy): 2x revenue is mid-range for agencies.
The structure matters more than the headline...
→ "What's the deal structure — lump sum, earnout, equity?"
Paul Graham (advocate — contrarian): You're using fatigue as the frame,
but those aren't strategic reasons to sell...
→ "What's the thing you're not saying out loud?"
Patty McCord (premise challenger — people/transparency): Your team doesn't
know yet. That's the hinge...
→ "What would you do if you weren't afraid of the conversation?"
Lean: Negotiate harder ($2.2M+) and talk to your team before accepting.
Confidence delta: You came in leaning toward acceptance. The panel says
negotiate first, inform second, then decide.
Want me to go deeper? I can run cross-examination between Paul and Elad,
do a pre-mortem, or give you the full deep analysis.
Standard mode (default) is fast — 3-4 expert takes, a lean, a confidence delta, and a menu to go deeper. Designed to be useful in under 60 seconds of reading.
Deep mode is the full structured analysis. Three ways to get it:
- Say "go deep" or "full version" in your ask
- Council detects a one-way door and offers to escalate
- After standard mode, ask for any deeper element
Deep mode adds: historical analogies per expert, what would change each expert's mind, cross-examination between the two most opposed voices, a silence audit (what the entire panel took for granted), and a full synthesis block with next actions.
Say "what kills this" or "pre-mortem" — each expert assumes the decision was made and failed 18 months later. They trace back from failure with specific warning signs you can check before committing.
Say "red team this" or "what would a competitor do" — each expert switches sides and advises a well-resourced adversary on how to defeat your decision within 12 months. Realistic attack vectors, real-world precedents, and the defensive moves you can make before committing.
Council names cognitive biases when it sees them — anchoring, sunk cost, survivorship, status quo, confirmation, loss aversion. Inline, one sentence, no lectures. In standard mode it appears in the "Watch for" line; in deep mode it gets a dedicated section in the framing audit.
Council picks dynamically from ~37 named experts across eleven domains — it selects the 3-4 whose worldviews create the most productive tension for your specific decision.
| Domain | Experts |
|---|---|
| Startup / product strategy | Garry Tan, Paul Graham, Julie Zhuo, Andrew Chen |
| Engineering / architecture | Boris Cherny, Thariq Shihipar, Kelsey Hightower, Charity Majors, Dan Abramov |
| Product / design | Mike Krieger, Rasmus Andersson, Shreyas Doshi, Rahul Vohra |
| Systems / operations | Rahul Patil, Will Larson |
| Strategy / investing | Elad Gil, Patrick Collison, Tyler Cowen |
| GTM / sales / revenue | Jason Lemkin, David Sacks, Elena Verna, Laela Sturdy |
| Marketing / positioning | April Dunford, Emily Kramer, Andy Raskin |
| Finance / CFO lens | Tomasz Tunguz, Bill Gurley |
| Legal / regulatory | Heather Meeker, Alex Macgillivray |
| AI / ML strategy | Andrej Karpathy, Sarah Guo, Simon Willison |
| Security | Alex Stamos |
| People / org / culture | Patty McCord, Liz Wiseman, Patrick Lencioni, Claire Hughes Johnson |
Every panel includes at least one premise challenger (questions whether you're solving the right problem) and one advocate (steel-mans the option you're most reluctant to take). Both are labeled in the output so you know which perspective is a deliberate stress-test.
Council actively checks whether the roster is sufficient for your decision. If it detects a domain gap — or the decision needs deeper specialization than the roster provides — it'll stop and tell you before proceeding, then walk you through adding a custom expert:
This decision hinges on clinical workflow adoption, and I don't have
an expert who thinks natively in that space. Who would you trust most
on this? I need their worldview, what they optimize for, and their
killer question.
You can also add experts yourself anytime:
[add: Sarah Chen — CFO. Thinks in unit economics and runway. Asks: "does this show up in the P&L in a good way?"]
Custom experts get the same treatment as roster experts: full perspectives, role labels, cross-examination eligibility.
We benchmarked across three decision scenarios. Structural quality: 90% vs 13% on 33 assertions.
| Capability | Council | Raw Claude |
|---|---|---|
| Interview before advising | Yes | No |
| Named experts with clashing worldviews | Yes | No |
| Reversibility analysis | Yes | No |
| Premise challenger + advocate roles | Yes | No |
| Confidence delta | Yes | No |
| Silence audit | Yes | No |
| Directional lean | Yes | Usually |
| Situation-specific detail | Yes | Yes |
The skill's value isn't smarter advice — Claude is already smart. It's the structure of the thinking: interview before advising, clashing worldviews instead of a single perspective, reversibility gates that slow you down on irreversible choices, and a confidence delta that forces honesty about whether the analysis actually moved you.
Council works standalone. If you also use CPO, they're complementary:
- CPO = "what to build and whether to build it" — structured product decisions with kill criteria and a persistent journal
- Council = "stress-test this with people who'd disagree" — expert panel simulation with clashing worldviews
After CPO gives you a verdict, use Council to pressure-test it. After Council gives you a lean, use CPO to structure the execution with kill criteria.
Why named experts? Frameworks are the engine (reversibility gates, framing audits, silence audits). The named experts make the output memorable and debatable — "I think Kelsey's wrong here because..." is a more productive reaction than "I disagree with point 3."
Why interview first? Most people who say "help me decide" need someone to ask the right question. The interview surfaces hidden preferences, unstated constraints, and whether the problem is even framed correctly.
Why the confidence delta? Advisory conversations that don't name whether they moved your prior are theater.
- Expert persistence — Custom experts added via
[add:]disappear between sessions. Future versions should let users save domain experts so repeat users (e.g., a healthcare founder) don't re-add their domain expert every time. - Decision journal — Track decisions across sessions. "You decided X six weeks ago. Here's what the panel said. How did it play out?"
- Red team mode — Separate from pre-mortem. Assumes an adversary is actively trying to beat you, not just that things went wrong.
Open issues for decisions where Council performed poorly. The most useful feedback: "the panel missed X" or "expert Y's take felt generic." Include the prompt and the output.
# Run the eval suite
cat evals/evals.jsonThree canonical scenarios (architecture, acquisition, fundraising) with 33 total assertions. See tests/expected-outputs.md for benchmark results and analysis notes.
Council is not a prompt. It's a structured decision stress-test: interview before advising, clashing worldviews, mechanical checks (reversibility, framing gaps, silence audit), and a confidence delta that forces honesty about whether the analysis actually moved you.