Agent Council

Five reviewers pull your draft apart, keep their disagreement visible, and hand you one verdict — for the text you can't un-ship.

A runtime-portable 5-agent council that adjudicates text artifacts before they ship. Five role-conditioned LLM deliberators run in a 2-round async protocol with cross-read rebuttal. One verdict — SHIP, REVISE, or HOLD — plus a structured revision brief and a full audit transcript.

No SDK. No API keys. No vendor lock-in. The Council shells out to whatever LLM CLI is configured (claude, lmstudio, ollama, mock). Modularity invariant is CI-tested — the council can be removed and producing agents keep working unchanged.

Personal research, separate from my day-job at Microsoft. MIT-licensed.

Install · How it works · Quickstart · Customize · AGENTS.md · CHANGELOG

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Install

Claude Code (plugin)

claude plugin marketplace add Avyayalaya/agent-council
claude plugin install agent-council@avyayalaya

Then in any Claude Code session: /council-review path/to/artifact.md or /council-sweep.

Python (pip from source)

git clone https://github.com/Avyayalaya/agent-council.git
cd agent-council
pip install -e .
cp council.yaml.example council.yaml  # then edit
python -m agent_council review path/to/artifact.md --tier=1

Requires Python ≥3.11 and at least one supported LLM CLI on PATH.

MCP server (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, custom agents)

pip install mcp>=1.0

Add to your client's MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "agent-council": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["<absolute-path>/agent-council/mcp/agent_council_mcp_server.py"],
      "env": {
        "COUNCIL_CONFIG": "<absolute-path>/agent-council/council.yaml"
      }
    }
  }
}

Tool exposed: council_review(artifact_path, tier=1). Full setup: mcp/README.md. council_sweep and council_audit tools land in v0.1.2.

the analytics product CLI, Cursor, Cline, OpenCode (via APM Skills)

v0.1.1 ships each deliberator as a standalone Skill under skills/ so any APM-compatible harness gets the methodology inline — no Python CLI required for single-perspective review.

apm marketplace add Avyayalaya/agent-council
apm install agent-council --target copilot

Then in the harness, load one Skill at a time:

• skeptic-review — adversarial steelman pass
• voice-identity-review — line-level voice audit + CXO test
• evidence-calibration-review — per-claim T1-T6 evidence-tier audit
• strategy-stakes-review — goal-fit and opportunity-cost check
• adjudicator-synthesis — verdict synthesis from 2+ deliberator outputs

Use cases per surface:

Use case	Surface
Run full automated Council on an artifact with parallel deliberators + 2-round cross-read + JSONL audit	python -m agent_council review path/to/artifact.md --tier=1 or MCP council_review tool
Apply one deliberator role to a doc I am editing right now (the analytics product, Claude, Cursor)	Load the matching Skill
Compose 2 or 3 deliberators ad-hoc for a multi-angle ad-hoc review	Load multiple Skills sequentially, then optionally load adjudicator-synthesis
Use slash commands in Claude Code	/council-review path/to/artifact.md (Claude Code only)

Skills vs CLI — what you get on each path

The Skills are the interactive single-perspective surface. The CLI / MCP is the automated full-Council surface. They share the same 5-deliberator methodology but trade differently:

Capability	Compose Skills sequentially	Full Council via CLI / MCP
One perspective at a time	yes	yes (the deliberators)
Parallel deliberator execution	no	yes
Round 2 cross-read rebuttal (each deliberator sees the other 3 R1 critiques)	no	yes
Adjudicator prior-verdict compounding loop on artifact_type	no	yes
JSONL audit log, replayable	no	yes
Single adjudicated verdict (not 5 separate critiques)	no	yes
Structured, persisted verdict record per run	no	yes
Cost per review	1 LLM call per Skill	~9 LLM calls (4 deliberators × 2 rounds + Adjudicator)
Sweet spot	Ad-hoc 1 or 2 perspectives on a doc you are editing	Pre-ship gating in pipelines; structured, persisted audit trail

Composing 5 Skills sequentially produces 5 independent critiques. That is useful for ad-hoc multi-angle review, but it is not the same artifact as the automated Council. If you need parallel execution, cross-read rebuttal, or a structured, persisted JSONL verdict record, use the CLI / MCP path.

Any other LLM (ChatGPT, Gemini, manual)

Read the 5 prompts at prompts/. Each is self-contained and explains what the deliberator should produce. Run them in your tool of choice, then merge the verdicts using the policy in src/agent_council/verdict.py.

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How it works

   ┌──────────┐
   │ artifact │ ───► tier-1?  No  ───► skip
   └────┬─────┘        │
        │ Yes
        ▼
   ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │  ROUND 1 — 4 deliberators run in parallel              │
   │                                                        │
   │   Skeptic        Voice &      Evidence &     Strategy  │
   │   (adversarial)  Identity     Calibration    & Stakes  │
   │                                                        │
   │   each → {verdict, scores, would_block, irreducible,   │
   │           revision_brief}                              │
   └─────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
                                 │
                                 ▼
   ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │  ROUND 2 — same 4 deliberators, with cross-read        │
   │                                                        │
   │   Each sees the other 3 R1 verdicts; may update.       │
   │   Single-deliberator misfires get corrected; indep-    │
   │   endent first reads preserved.                        │
   └─────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
                                 │
                                 ▼
   ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │  ADJUDICATOR (single call)                             │
   │                                                        │
   │   Merges 4 R2 verdicts + reads prior verdicts on same  │
   │   artifact_type from council_log.jsonl (D6 loop).      │
   │                                                        │
   │   Verdict policy:                                      │
   │     3+ block on irreducible       → HOLD               │
   │     3+ block on reducible +                            │
   │       Adjudicator reasons downgrade → REVISE           │
   │     otherwise                       → SHIP             │
   │                                  + revision_brief      │
   └─────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
                                 │
                                 ▼
                      SHIP / REVISE / HOLD
                      + revision_brief
                      + audit row → council_log.jsonl

The five roles

Deliberator	Concern	Reads
Skeptic	Adversarial review — catches premature coherence, narrative fallacy, survivorship bias, unstated assumptions	(artifact only)
Voice & Identity	Voice DNA, banned-pattern enforcement, channel register, CXO test	Operator's voice corpus + persona DNA
Evidence & Calibration	Source verification, evidence-tier classification (T1–T6), confidence levels, base rates	(artifact only)
Strategy & Stakes	Goal alignment, stake calibration, opportunity cost vs. operator's active projects	Operator's goals doc + project state
Adjudicator	Merge + prior-verdict loop. Final verdict and revision brief	All four above + council_log.jsonl

Why a council, not a single judge?

LLM-as-judge approaches collapse five distinct concerns into one critic:

• Is the argument adversarially sound?
• Does it match the operator's voice?
• Are the sources credible?
• Does it advance the operator's actual goals?
• Should it ship?

A unified judge averages these into one score. The Council keeps them separated. Each deliberator owns one concern, reads one context, surfaces one kind of dissent. The Adjudicator merges them — but you see which deliberator blocked and why, not just the merged number.

This matters for tier-1 artifacts where the cost of shipping a flaw is high (public publish, irreversible commitment, identity-shaping document) and the cost of one more revision pass is low.

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Quickstart

After pip install -e . and copying council.yaml.example → council.yaml:

# Single artifact
python -m agent_council review path/to/artifact.md --tier=1

# Daily sweep over watch paths
python -m agent_council sweep --since=24h

# Audit recent verdicts (filter by date/verdict/artifact-type)
python -m agent_council audit --since=7d --verdict=HOLD

Output goes to stdout as JSON; the audit row appends to council_log.jsonl.

See what a verdict looks like

examples/demo/ ships a fictional LinkedIn post + the structured verdict the Council produced for it + the extracted revision brief. Read these first to calibrate expectations before running your first real review.

Tier classification

The Council is designed for tier-1 artifacts — the ones where review cost is justified:

• Tier 1 (gates through Council): external-facing OR irreversible OR identity-shaping OR memory writes. Examples: published writing, public READMEs, investor messages, resume revisions, additions to a learnings file, memory writes.
• Tier 2 (skips Council): internal drafts, dashboards, infrastructure, dispatch updates.
• Tier 3 (1-in-5 sample): daily briefings, internal analyses, planning artifacts.

Tier classification is rule-based — glob patterns in council.yaml#tier_rules.

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Built for agents

The Council was designed to be invoked from outside an agent loop, not from inside it. That's not a stylistic choice — it's a CI-tested invariant:

PYTHONPATH=src python -m unittest tests.test_modularity_invariant -v

The test scans the host operator system's agents/*/prompt.md files and asserts zero references to Council. If a producing agent's prompt starts to know about the gate that reviews it, the build fails.

This means:

• An orchestrator can route any artifact to Council without touching the producing agent.
• Removing the Council leaves every producing agent functional (with reduced quality on tier-1 artifacts).
• The Council ships as a standalone runtime — wire it into Emissary, MCP servers, slash commands, CI pipelines, or your own agent system without coupling.

AGENTS.md is the machine-readable capability manifest — agent orchestrators read this to route tasks without reading 1,300 lines of source.

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Customize

Add a new runtime adapter (one file)

# src/agent_council/runtimes/my_runtime.py
from .base import RuntimeAdapter

class MyRuntimeAdapter(RuntimeAdapter):
    async def invoke(self, prompt: str, *, timeout: int) -> str:
        # Shell out / HTTP / SDK call — return the model's response.
        ...

Register in src/agent_council/runtimes/__init__.py, reference by type: in council.yaml. The adapter's interface is the only contract; the orchestrator handles retries, schema validation, cross-read marshaling.

Add a new deliberator (one prompt file)

Drop a prompts/<name>.md following the 5-section template:

1. Role declaration — who you are, what you optimize for, what you do NOT do.
2. Methodology — numbered steps for reading the artifact and producing the critique.
3. Context Verification Gate — files this deliberator must have access to.
4. Output schema — matching the JSON shape in src/agent_council/schema.py.
5. Communication style — 3–5 example phrases showing the deliberator's editorial voice.

Add a block to council.yaml#deliberators. The orchestrator picks it up.

Override the verdict policy

src/agent_council/verdict.py:VerdictPolicy.apply is the single source of truth. Subclass it and pass to the orchestrator if you need different merge semantics. Unit tests at tests/test_verdict_merge.py pin the default behavior — fork them for your override.

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Audit log

Every Council invocation appends one line to council_log.jsonl. Schema follows Rule 35 v2:

{
  "v": 2,
  "ts": "2026-05-18T...Z",
  "artifact": "path/to/artifact.md",
  "artifact_type": "linkedin_post",
  "round1": [{"deliberator": "skeptic", "verdict": "revise", "scores": {...}, "would_block": false, "revision_brief": "..."}, ...],
  "round2": [...],
  "adjudicator": {
    "final_verdict": "REVISE",
    "reasoning": "...",
    "revision_brief": "...",
    "applied_compounding": true,
    "prior_verdicts_consulted": 3
  }
}

Append-only. The Adjudicator reads prior entries on the same artifact_type to apply the D6 compounding loop — every new verdict consults the history. Two consecutive HOLDs on the same artifact_type sharpen the Adjudicator's reasoning on the third pass.

Filter with jq or the audit subcommand:

jq 'select(.adjudicator.final_verdict == "HOLD")' council_log.jsonl
python -m agent_council audit --since=7d --verdict=HOLD

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Runtimes

Runtime	Recommended for	Notes
claude_cli	Production tier-1 gating	Requires Anthropic Claude CLI installed + authenticated. Default.
lmstudio	Local sub-sample testing	HTTP 500 on large parallel prompts at default concurrency — tune max_concurrent and context_length.
ollama	Offline / local-first	Lower-end models may not satisfy the deliberator schema; fall back to claude_cli for production.
mock_cli	CI / smoke tests	Canned responses for testing the orchestrator without burning tokens.
gh_models	Stub (documented fallback)	Placeholder for future GitHub Models adapter.

Mix runtimes within a single Council run — e.g., one deliberator on lmstudio for style diversity, the rest on claude_cli. Configure per-deliberator runtime_override: in council.yaml.

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Honest limitations

• Soft file-path coupling. Voice & Identity and Strategy & Stakes read external context files. What they contain is the operator's responsibility.
• Same-model self-style risk. When all deliberators run on the same underlying model, they share that model's style preferences and may converge on its blind spots. Mitigation: run one deliberator on a different model family.
• Behavioral coupling on producing agents. If a producing agent learns "the Council will catch X," it may loosen on X. Structural and unfixable inside the package; mitigation is operator discipline (periodic audits with Council OFF vs. ON).
• Adjudicator non-determinism. Same artifact can produce slightly different verdicts across runs. Documented; treated as honest LLM-as-judge variance.

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Tests

PYTHONPATH=src python -m unittest discover tests -v

105 tests. The orchestrator test uses mock_cli, so no real Claude tokens burn during CI.

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License

MIT. See LICENSE.

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Citation

Agent Council: A runtime-portable adjudicator council for tier-1 artifact gating.
v0.1.0, 2026. https://github.com/Avyayalaya/agent-council