Council of High Intelligence: 18 AI Personas Deliberate Your Hardest Decisions in Claude Code

One frontier model answering "Should we open-source our agent framework?" gives you one fluent opinion dressed as certainty.

Council of High Intelligence (~2.8k GitHub stars, v1.1.0) runs the opposite play: 18 intellectual personas — Aristotle, Socrates, Feynman, Kahneman, Torvalds, Taleb, Munger — deliberate across multiple LLM providers and return a verdict that leads with what they cannot resolve.

One command in Claude Code: /council.

TL;DR

Why a Council Instead of One Prompt?

The design targets architecture decisions, open-source vs proprietary, pricing models, acquisition offers, and build vs buy — questions where being wrong is expensive.

Compare to OpenRouter Fusion, which ensembles frontier models in the cloud for research. Council is local skill orchestration in Claude Code with persona-specific system prompts and deliberation protocol enforcement.

The 18 Council Members

Each member is a Claude Code subagent with a named intellectual tradition:

Polarity pairs are deliberate counterweights — e.g. Socrates destroys assumptions while Feynman rebuilds from first principles. Duo mode pairs them directly.

Default model tiers per member (opus vs sonnet) balance cost and depth; auto-routing spreads members across providers when Codex, Gemini, or Ollama are installed.

Deliberation Modes

Full mode (default)

Three rounds: independent analysis → cross-examination → final positions, then verdict synthesis.

/council Should we open-source our agent framework?
/council --triad strategy What's our competitive moat?

Quick mode

Two rounds — no cross-examination. For smaller calls:

/council --quick Should we add caching here?

Duo mode

Two-member dialectic via polarity pairs:

/council --duo Should we use microservices or monolith?
/council --duo --members torvalds,ada Is this abstraction worth it?

20 predefined triads bundle three members for domains like strategy, shipping, and safety.

Multi-Provider Auto-Routing

The council detects installed providers and assigns members without manual YAML (unless you override):

Hard rule: polarity pairs land on different providers when possible — so Socrates and Feynman aren't the same model wearing different hats.

Flags:

• --dry-route — print routing table without running
• --no-auto-route — Claude-only
• --models path/to/yaml — manual seat allocation

Useful alongside OmniRoute if you want local gateway fallback while council members hit different upstream models.

The 7-Step Protocol (Full Mode)

1. Provider routing — assign members to models
2. Problem Restate Gate — each member reframes the question; if 3 restate differently, the question was wrong
3. Independent analysis — no peeking at peers
4. Cross-examination — challenge claims
5. Enforcement scan — dissent quotas, novelty gates, counterfactual prompts
6. Final positions — updated after challenge
7. Verdict synthesis — Unresolved Questions and Recommended Next Steps first

v1.1.0 improved tie-breaking — counted weighted tally instead of prose impression.

Install and First Run

git clone https://github.com/0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence.git
cd council-of-high-intelligence
./install.sh              # Claude Code
./install.sh --codex      # Claude + Codex skills

Restart Claude Code, then:

/council Should we accept this acquisition offer?
/council --quick Should we release today?
/council --duo monolith vs microservices for our stage?

Validation: ./scripts/council-simulation-checklist.sh · Demo pack in repo.

Requirements: Claude Code CLI (or Codex for Codex skill). Optional: Codex, Gemini CLI, Ollama, Cursor CLI, NVIDIA API key for multi-provider diversity.

When to Use Council vs Other Tools

Council is decision infrastructure, not a replacement for coding agents.

Limitations

• Latency and cost — full mode with 18 members is expensive; use --quick, --duo, or --triad
• Still LLM theater if misused — personas don't guarantee wisdom; protocol reduces groupthink, not stupidity
• Provider detection varies — missing CLIs fall back to Claude-only
• CC0 — no warranty; fork and adapt freely

Related Reading

• OmniRoute — Local AI Gateway for Claude Code
• OpenRouter Fusion — Multi-Model Panel API
• Andrew Ng's Three Loops for 0-to-1 Products
• What Is Loop Engineering?
• Premortem Agent Skill — Risk Review