What is this?

LLM Council is a skill (plugin) for GitHub Copilot CLI. Instead of getting one model's opinion, you get a structured debate between five frontier models — with peer review, anonymous ranking, and a chairman's synthesis.

Think of it as a panel of senior engineers reviewing your question. Each brings a different perspective (Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral), they critique each other's answers without knowing who said what, and a chairman distils the best reasoning into one definitive response.

Everything runs locally through your existing Copilot subscription and GitHub token. No extra API keys, no external services, no data leaving your machine beyond the model inference calls you're already making.

How it works

Question ──► 5 councillors answer in parallel (Stage 1)
                    │
                    ▼
         Responses anonymised (A, B, C, D, E)
                    │
                    ▼
         Each councillor ranks all responses (Stage 2)
                    │
                    ▼
         Rankings aggregated (Borda count)
                    │
                    ▼
         Chairman reads everything, writes synthesis (Stage 3)
                    │
                    ▼
         Final answer ──► CLI + Browser UI + Disk

A local web UI shows every stage unfolding in real time. No external API keys required — uses your existing Copilot subscription and gh auth token.

Architecture

Deliberation flow

Default council

| Model | Vendor | Role | Backend | |-------|--------|------|---------| | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Anthropic | Councillor | Copilot inference (task) | | GPT-5.2 | OpenAI | Councillor | Copilot inference (task) | | Llama 3.3 70B | Meta | Councillor | GitHub Models | | DeepSeek V3 | DeepSeek | Councillor | GitHub Models | | Mistral Medium 2505 | Mistral | Councillor | GitHub Models | | Claude Opus 4.7 | Anthropic | Chairman | Copilot inference (task) |

Two inference paths, zero extra credentials:

• task backend — models dispatched through Copilot's built-in inference (your subscription covers it)
• github-models backend — models called via models.github.ai using your gh auth token

Install

One-liner (npx)

npx ghcp-llm-council install

Manual

# 1. Install GitHub CLI (if you don't have it)
winget install GitHub.cli

# 2. Authenticate (required for model inference)
gh auth login

# 3. Clone and install the skill
git clone https://github.com/thevgavini/ghcp-llm-council.git
cd ghcp-llm-council
.\install-skill.ps1

Uninstall

npx ghcp-llm-council uninstall

Restart your Copilot CLI session after installing. Requires Node 20+ and GitHub Copilot CLI.

Usage

In any Copilot CLI session:

ask the council: should we use a monorepo or polyrepo for our microservices?

The skill:

1. Asks you to pick a mode (general, review, design, plan, research)
2. Spins up a local server, opens the browser UI
3. Dispatches all councillors in parallel
4. Runs peer review + ranking
5. Chairman synthesises a final answer
6. Returns the synthesis in chat and persists to disk

Follow-ups

follow up: what about the CI/CD complexity tradeoff?

Runs a fresh 3-stage deliberation on the existing conversation thread.

File context

council: review src/auth.cjs for security holes

The skill auto-detects file references and passes them to every councillor inline.

Modes

| Mode | Best for | Trigger words | |------|----------|---------------| | general | Open Q&A, opinions, explanations | (default) | | review | Code review, security audit | "review", "audit", "find bugs" | | design | Architecture decisions, tech choices | "design", "should I use X or Y" | | plan | Implementation roadmaps | "plan", "roadmap", "how would you build" | | research | Deep dives, learning | "explain", "how does X work" |

Each mode has tuned prompts for councillors and chairman. Mode packs can override the council lineup (e.g., review mode uses Opus as both councillor and chairman).

Configuration

Defaults: skills/llm-council/defaults/council.json
Per-project override: <cwd>/.llm-council/state/council.json

{
  "council": [
    {"id": "claude-sonnet-4.6", "vendor": "Anthropic", "display": "Claude Sonnet 4.6", "backend": "task"},
    {"id": "gpt-5.2",           "vendor": "OpenAI",    "display": "GPT-5.2",           "backend": "task"},
    {"id": "meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct", "vendor": "Meta", "display": "Llama 3.3 70B", "backend": "github-models"}
  ],
  "chairman": "claude-opus-4.7",
  "chairman_backend": "task",
  "min_responses_to_proceed": 2,
  "councillor_timeout_seconds": 120
}

Add any model supported by Copilot inference or GitHub Models. The council scales to any size.

Project structure

skills/llm-council/
├── SKILL.md              # Agent instructions (the skill contract)
├── bin/council.cjs       # CLI helper (init, patch, advance, synthesize)
├── server/               # Zero-dependency HTTP + WebSocket server
│   ├── start.cjs         # Entry point
│   └── public/           # Browser UI (vanilla JS, live cards)
├── defaults/council.json # Default model lineup
└── prompts/              # Mode-specific prompt templates
    ├── general/          # councillor.md + chairman.md
    ├── review/
    ├── design/
    ├── plan/
    └── research/

State lives in <cwd>/.llm-council/ — add to .gitignore.

Development

node skills/llm-council/server/start.cjs   # Launch server standalone for UI dev
node skills/llm-council/server/stop.cjs    # Tear down

Tests live on the tests/suite branch:

git checkout tests/suite
npm test

Inspired by

karpathy/llm-council — the original multi-model deliberation concept. This project brings it into the Copilot CLI ecosystem with live visualisation, zero external credentials, domain-specific modes (review, design, plan, research) with tuned prompts, and a skill-native interface that runs entirely from your terminal.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Bundles marked (MIT) and DOMPurify (Apache-2.0 / MPL-2.0) in the frontend. Full notices in server/public/vendor/LICENSES/.