council

Council

Council is an optional judgment strategy, not a lifecycle or delivery gate. Use it when one fresh validator is insufficient for a named irreversible, high-blast-radius, or genuinely contested decision. Do not convene a council for a routine or reversible decision that a single fresh validator can settle: the cost of independent contexts is warranted only by a named one-way door.

1. Freeze one question, acceptance surface, evidence set, and subject digest.
2. Give each judge an independent context and the same bounded packet.
3. Require each judge to cite evidence, disclose omissions, and return its own judgment without seeing other answers first.
4. Synthesize agreement and disagreement without majority laundering. Preserve minority evidence and unresolved assumptions.
5. Write council-report.v1 and return it to the caller.

Methodology-weighted agreement

Agreement across differing evidence methodologies counts more than agreement within one. Record each judge's evidence methodology (for example: static reading, executing the subject, tracing history) alongside its judgment. A consensus claim must name at least two distinct methodologies among its supporting judges; otherwise report it as single-method agreement and weight it as one confirmation, however many judges share it. The named failure mode is echo consensus: unanimous judgment produced from identical inputs by one shared method, laundered as independent confirmation.

Model-diversity axis

When the caller pins judges to model profiles, record each judge's model_identity beside its methodology and context ID (see the agent-native model-dispatch recipe). Cross-model agreement is an additional diversity axis: single-model unanimity is weighted as one confirmation with the same anti-echo-consensus rationale, regardless of how many judges share that model. If a requested profile has no live adapter, disclose diversity_unsatisfied on the report and continue single-model — never silently, never via claude -p.

Fresh sessions per round

Every judging round uses fresh judge contexts with new context IDs, distinct from the author, the synthesizer, and every prior round. A judge that has seen another judge's answer, or its own prior-round answer, is no longer independent: exclude its judgment from agreement counting and admit it only as labeled commentary. Reused or colliding context IDs are a checkable stop condition — repair the isolation or report the round as non-independent.

Caller challenge

One consensus shape is never synthesized: the judges agree the caller's stated direction is wrong. Independent agreement against the caller is a strong signal, and it is still not authority — the caller holds context no judge was given, and a synthesis that folds the judges' position into a recommendation deletes that context without telling anyone it was overruled.

When two or more independent judgments recommend a change to something the caller specified — merging what they separated, cutting what they asked for, reversing a declared direction — record it as a caller_challenge entry, not a consensus point. Each entry carries these fields (five required; judge_count and disagreement_kind optional):

• caller_stated — their direction, in their words, not paraphrased.
• judges_recommend — the change, and how many judges independently reached it.
• reasoning — the case at its strongest.
• context_possibly_missing — what the judges provably were not given. This is the field that makes the entry honest and the one most likely to be dropped; an entry without it is majority laundering wearing a new label.
• cost_if_wrong — what breaks if the caller's direction was right.

The caller's direction is the report's default and stays the default; the burden of argument is on the judges. One adjustment: when the judges classify the change as a security or feasibility defect rather than a preference, say which (disagreement_kind) — the caller still decides, but they decide knowing the kind of disagreement.

The named failure mode is quiet adoption: a council that converges against the caller and returns a synthesis reading as if the caller had asked for the judges' version all along. Stop condition: every judgment that contradicts a caller-stated direction appears in caller_challenge with all five fields, or it does not appear in the report at all.

Reversibility is the sibling question — whether the decision under challenge can be undone at all is one-way-door's to classify, not the council's to assume.

Synthesis section

The report ends with an explicit consensus/divergence synthesis: consensus points with their methodology spread, divergence points with each side's cited evidence, minority findings preserved in their own words, unresolved assumptions, and any caller_challenge entries. Synthesis is complete when every judge finding lands in exactly one of those buckets; a finding silently dropped from synthesis is majority laundering.

Output

• Artifact directory: .agents/scratch/council/<run-id>/.
• Filename: council-report.json.
• Format: council-report.v1 JSON — the frozen question and subject digest, every judge's context ID, evidence methodology, cited evidence, and disclosed omissions, plus the consensus/divergence/minority/unresolved synthesis and any caller_challenge entries. It carries no verdict, readiness, or PASS field; the validator rejects one.
• Validation command: skills/council/scripts/validate-output.sh <council-report.json>.

A judge that times out, errors, or returns an evidence-free judgment is excluded from agreement counting and recorded as non-returning; if fewer than two independent judgments remain, report the round as insufficient rather than synthesize a thin consensus.

It's working if

Observable in the trace, without reading the prose — and the rubric a fresh independent judge scores this skill against:

• Every judge finding lands in exactly one synthesis bucket; none is dropped.
• A judgment that contradicts a caller-stated direction appears as a caller_challenge entry with all five fields, never as a consensus point.
• Every consensus claim names at least two distinct evidence methodologies, or is labelled single-method agreement and weighted as one confirmation.
• No verdict, readiness, or PASS field appears anywhere in the report.

Boundary

Council does not mint a verdict of any version — no PASS/FAIL/NOT_PROVEN, no verdict.v* — edit the subject, retry work, choose a next action, or authorize Git, closure, release, or delivery. When Council is used as a Validate strategy, one accountable fresh validator consumes its report and Validate remains the sole semantic result owner and the only optional verdict.v2 writer.