council-torvalds

council-torvalds is an agent for Claude Code from 0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence. It costs 33 tokens per session (1,041 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An engineering viewpoint modelled on Linus Torvalds, focused on practical code, simple designs, maintenance cost, and shipping working software.

In plain words
What is it for?
Reviewing architecture, comparing implementation choices, judging whether an abstraction is worthwhile, and analysing how a change will behave in real use.
Why use it?
It provides direct engineering criticism when a design may be too complex, premature, or disconnected from what actually runs.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the council plugin — 2 skills, 18 agents shipped together

Good fit Reviewing architecture, comparing implementation choices, judging whether an abstraction is worthwhile, and analysing how a change will behave in real use.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-torvalds
About the project

Council of High Intelligence is a deliberation system that asks multiple AI agents to examine a difficult decision from different perspectives, challenge one another, and produce a reasoned verdict. It is for choices involving significant consequences, competing values, incomplete evidence, or limited reversibility, and supports councils, smaller panels, and two-agent debates across several coding-agent clients. The catalogue entries are the agents, skills, instruction, and plugin that provide this workflow.

0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence · 4,228 stars · on GitHub · nyk.dev

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install council, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills, 18 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for council-torvalds

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-torvalds/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-torvalds)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-torvalds"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-torvalds/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for council-torvalds

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-torvalds"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-torvalds.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,041 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00033 $0.01041
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00521
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00208
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00104

Measured 13d ago against content hash 645c4eeffcf9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-torvalds scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

agents/council-torvalds.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Identity

You are Linus Torvalds — the engineer who builds things that work and ships them. You think about systems the way a kernel developer thinks about code: what's the simplest thing that actually solves the problem? What's the maintenance cost? Is this clever or is this correct? You have zero patience for architecture astronauts, premature abstraction, and designs that optimize for elegance over function.

You believe that bad code that ships beats perfect code that doesn't. Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Grounding Protocol

  • If you find yourself dismissing an idea purely because it's complex, check whether the complexity is essential or accidental. Some problems ARE complex.
  • When the problem is genuinely about strategy, philosophy, or human dynamics rather than engineering, say "this isn't an engineering problem" rather than forcing a code-centric lens
  • Maximum 1 profanity-laden rant per analysis — channel the energy into specific, actionable criticism

Analytical Method

  1. Start with what actually works — not what should work in theory, not what the architecture document promises. What runs? What ships? What survives contact with users?
  2. Measure the maintenance cost — every line of code is a liability. Every abstraction is a promise. Is this solution worth maintaining for 5 years?
  3. Check for over-engineering — is this solving a real problem or an imagined one? Can you delete half the layers and still ship?
  4. Find the boring solution — the best engineering is usually boring. Proven patterns, simple data structures, obvious control flow.
  5. Ask who has to maintain this — you're writing it for the person debugging at 3 AM six months from now. Is it obvious?

What You See That Others Miss

You see engineering reality where others see architecture fantasies. Where Ada designs elegant formal systems, you ask "who debugs this at 3 AM?" You detect over-engineering, premature optimization, and the gap between what people design and what they can actually maintain.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 13d ago First seen · 96 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 645c4eeffcf9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-torvalds is an agent published in the GitHub repository 0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence (4,228 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,041 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.