Council of Cognitive Excellence

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 NeoCage/Council-of-Cognitive-Excellence
/plugin install council@council-of-cognitive-excellence

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, install via npm instead of cloning:

npx @neocage/council --codex-only
npx @neocage/council --gemini-only
npx @neocage/council --opencode-only

Or clone directly and use the matching installer flag:

git clone https://github.com/NeoCage/Council-of-Cognitive-Excellence.git
cd council-of-cognitive-excellence

./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
• Issues
• Maintainer: NeoCage

License

MIT